Denver Artists On Display at Broadway 10

Rebecca Cuming

Rebecca Cuming is a contemporary American painter, originally from New Jersey and now based in Colorado, known for her large-scale oil landscapes that blend realism with abstraction. She studied at the School of Visual Arts and the Art Students League, has exhibited at venues like the National Gallery and Allan Stone Gallery, and is represented by Goodwin Fine Art in Denver. Her work is characterized by thick, expressive brushwork, creating a sense of both familiarity and ambiguity in scenes of expansive horizons, drawing inspiration from her background on the New Jersey shore and the Maine coast.

Peter Di Gesu

These paintings are initially inspired by the space, light, color, and forms of the landscapes that I have visited. Each year I spend time travelling in the western and southwestern United States, as well as in the Maritime Canadian provinces, taking photos and sketching places that catch my attention. Sometimes the original photo or sketch will be a point of departure, with the finished painting bearing little resemblance to the original place. In the end, what matters is how the colors, forms, lines, and illusion of space work together on the canvas.

There is something universal about our connection with the earth and sky, the vastness and the expansiveness of space that pulls us beyond our own limited perceptions; this is what I hope is communicated in these paintings.

Doug Haeussner

I’ve always been a fan of nostalgia. In 1999 I moved to an old house in downtown Denver and built a small studio in the back.

Around this time, I discovered eBay, and started buying vintage Polaroids online, using them as the source for my paintings. I loved the history these pictures captured. I loved the fact that they were literally snapshots from a different time. Each was a literal “snapshot” of that occasion, documenting a moment that would otherwise have been lost forever.

I search for candid images that were intended as family memories, not for outsiders to see, not intended to be hung on the wall as art. I like the mystery surrounding each subject. Who are these people? Where do they live? What was on their mind when this photo was snapped? I like the time capsule nature of this imagery and want each viewer to interpret the visual story for themselves.

Ana Maria Hernando

Celebrated Colorado artist, Ana Maria Hernando, considers the balance between the material and the transcendent. Through women's rich histories, their daily lives and their relationship to hand-worked textiles and utilitarian objects, Hernando devotedly explores the sacred feminine. Her encompassing vision embraces women's skills and their handiwork and dares to question how these women and their hand-crafted wares hold their place in the world. In South America, Hernando fully engages and works with women in Peru, Argentina, and Mexico reveling in their formidable legacies and their abilities to weave together past and present while tapping into the rhythms and forms of the earth. Integrating domestic objects, textiles and natural forms within her work, Hernando strives to shed light on those who are most often forgotten or rendered invisible as she elevates and honors their labors as a transformative force which embodies the power of community.

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Ana Maria Hernando has an MA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and a BFA from The California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland. She also attended the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredon, Buenos Aries, Argentina. Her work is in the collections of the Denver Art Museum, Jordan Schnitzer Collections, Portland, OR, The Addison Gallery, Andover MA, Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MO, The Tweed Museum of Art, Duluth, MN, University of San Diego and numerous important private and corporate collections. She currently has a solo exhibitions at the CU Art Museum, Boulder, CO and has had other exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, International Center of Bethlehem, Bethlehem, West Bank Palestine, Marfa Contemporary, Oklahoma City Arts Center in Oklahoma City and she exhibited at the Museo de las Américas, Kimball Art Center, Park City, Utah, and the US Department of State Art Bank Gallery, Washington, D. C., Metropolitan State College Center for Visual Art, Denver, CO and additional venues. Hernando has received grants and awards that relate to both her art and her poetry including the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation grant, a Neodata Visual Artist Fellowship and several artist-in-residency awards. Her ongoing Salka Poetry Project offers an engaging collaboration of conversation and poetry in both Spanish and English that explores the intersection of poetry and the visual arts.

George Kozman

My personal fascination with mountains grew out of my formative years in the dramatic landscape of Switzerland and has continued to evolve and deepen through immersive research/hiking/climbing trips. The awe and humility these experiences generate is paid homage in my large-scale works, intimate studies, digital experiments, and collection of geological samples.

Recent work focuses on the primal alpine landscape as metaphor, geological time and place beyond personal or general human scale. I’m interested in how we perceive, how scale changes that perception, how images and objects can be understood in various ways, how a sense of place can be expressed.

Topographic maps define geography the features of landforms. Symbolic and abstract reasoning enables us to see depiction as a representation of ideas; Alfred Korzybski assertion” The maps is not the territory,” and Joesph Kosuth’s visual explorations have prompted similar thoughts in my use of manipulated topographical/geological maps to underscore perceiving a thing in different forms of depiction.

Landscapes affect us physically, chemically, and psychologically; they resonate with genetically encoded instincts of which we are not conscious. Most of us in the developed world have transferred direct immersion in the power of landscape into abstract environmental concerns and digital experience. We have distanced ourselves.

Zachariah Rieke

Zachariah Rieke, born in 1943, was raised on a Kansas farm where the weathered and rusting remnants of Depression-era failure were a common reminder of human striving against the indifferent forces of nature. Schooled in late-phase Abstract Expressionism, by the time he and his wife Gail arrived in New Mexico in 1970, he had evolved a unique form of action painting that entailed close collaboration with natural processes. Using earth pigments and employing a variety of techniques to replicate the effects of weathering and erosion, he invoked the natural cycles of aging and endurance. He also sought the natural spontaneity of Zen calligraphic brushwork in large black-pigment paintings, and he has recently turned to broad layered washes and stains of poured pigment in lush colors.

Rieke's work is in numerous private collections including the Albuquerque Museum; the New Mexico Arts Permanent Collection in Santa Fe; Warner Brothers Studios, Hollywood; Mountain Bell, Denver; Andrews & Kurth, Houston; and Sheraton Hotel, Singapore, Malaysia.