Art on Mountain Gallery, Fort Collins, CO

This is our Art on Mountain Gallery at 102 West Mountain Ave in downtown beautiful Fort Collins, CO. I am the gallery director and have been for several years. We moved this gallery from the center of the Opera Galleria where it was the Benson Gallery to Mountain Avenue in
beautiful downtown Fort Collins. We have a wonderful location right between two great restaurants, Austins and Enzios and across the street from the Rio Grande Restaurant which is probably the most popular restaurant in Fort Collins.

This space had been a French Antique store called "The Nest", and it was. It was painted in splashes of bright red, yellow green and kind of messes of nest like stuff stuck here and there. The gallery artists looked a little pale when they first saw it, but I had a vision of what it could become and, with the help of all the artists and especially our carpenter, photographer James Steele, we created a beautiful little gallery. Everyone works hard to keep it beautiful and fresh.
Stop in whenever you are in town and see my work and that of 30 other award winning area artists. Beautiful art work, great prices!

Liesl and Lilli

Our daughter and granddaughter enjoying the summer sun. Lilli is now walking and talking a little. At least she has finally said "Nana".

Yesterday I spent the morning out painting the Old Town Square in Fort Collins. It was a beautiful day and I really enjoyed it. There were lots and lots of people walking around and watching us paint.

Fort Collins is just this beautiful city full of young people pushing baby carriages, lots of them dads!

I painted the buildings on Linden that were copied by Disney World in their small town USA in Floriday. All the leaves were golden, it was a wonderful day.

The Contessa Stairway, Vallala, Italy

I did this painting for my beautiful niece, Kristi,

to hang in her new house in California.

I painted a study of this while in Italy. It was

one of those perfect days, standing out in the

sunshine, on the side of a hill overlooking

Sienna, almost surreal in its beauty. I was standing nearby a beautiful area of umbrella

pines on a small gravel road. On the other side

of the road was a drop off into acres of olive

groves with poppies blooming on the side.

Could it possibly get any better than that?

I painted this in oil on a heavy linen canvas, it

is a wrap around canvas and I had my framer, Mike Otteman, do a beautiful heavy black frame that floats the painting.

This painting is 24 x 20 and has the essence of

Italy. The Contessa is 94 and she came out to

see the paintings we were doing. She always had her dog Prince with her. Price was a very scary Germany Shepherd, we kept our distance! But she was very friendly and spoke great English. Her second husband, Hugh, was

Scots and she had met him when they occupied the Villa and her lands during the Second World

War. I'll bet she was a beauty, she was still pretty at 94. The lands and her 13 houses had come down from her line of the family. So, when she met Hugh, she just put her husband and her son in a different house! Guess that worked fine.

WOW FORT COLLINS

This week the Colorado Coalition of Artists or COCOA has sponsored an art show called WOW Fort Collins. Everything in this art show had to use the initials wow, so I created a very abstract painting, which I used as a reference Michelle Vice's photo of a water and woodland scene. This painting I called War Over Water, mainly due to the problems we are having here to avoid the ruin of one of our most beautiful assets in Northern Colorado, the Cache La Poudre River. There is a plan afoot to build a reservoir on the Poudre north of Fort Collins which will really affect the flow of the river going through town. This painting is a reflection on the water of the battle we must fight to avoid losing our beautiful Poudre.