By Norman Kolpas
Storm clouds glowered over the Rockies as Karen Vance set out in her GMC van late one afternoon from her home on the outskirts of the Colorado ski resort of Winter Park. She headed down a country road she knew would lead her into a large old ranching community.
“I came across a spot where the fence rails were nailed right to the trees, showing that the ranchers were using what they had,” she recalls. “I loved such a human element in this beautiful landscape.” In the distance, beyond a bend in the road, she spied a gateway and a pile of hay bales. “By then, big snowflakes were coming down, and I knew I was in love with this scene,” Vance says. She pulled over, placed her pochade—the portable paint-box-and-easel-in-one favored by plein-air painters—on her lap, and began to capture the scene.
Before sunset, Vance had completed ALMOST HOME. The modestly sized oil painting preserves the moment with uncanny accuracy and immediacy: the snow-covered lane and meadows, the makeshift fence and towering trees, the hay bales and setting sun. But something deeper abides in the painting as well, beyond even its quietly enthralling subject matter and the masterly way in which the painter has composed and completed the work. You can feel the eerie sensation of cold, wet, heavy snowflakes fluttering down. You can almost hear the crunch of snow underfoot. More powerfully still, you can sense the way the sunset’s warm glow beckons you irresistibly, comfortingly, toward the welcome of a farmhouse that must be there, just out of sight around the bend.
Emotional experiences demand an abundance of talent and an absolutely sure hand if an artist is to convey them without crossing that point of no return into melodrama or kitsch. There’s no chance of that happening in Vance’s oil-on-linen paintings. She’s spent too much time honing her skills. She’s put too much effort into perfecting the process of rendering landscapes with unerring realism, tempered with a touch of impressionism in the passionate yet thoughtful way she applies her paints. And she cares too much about the scenes she chooses to portray—or, more to the point, the scenes that choose her to portray them. “I wake up some mornings and look outside, and the landscape is beckoning me, ‘Come on out and paint me!’” she says.
Art appreciation was a household habit the way Vance was raised. Her father gave her (and her older sister, Susan, now also an artist, and younger sister, Lindy, an illustrator) an intensive education in the arts every Sunday afternoon.“The highlight of our weekends was to go somewhere with Dad,” Vance recalls. “He’d show us how to draw trees or paint boats, or we’d go to summer art shows in the Gold Coast or Old Town, or to the Art Institute. Of course, we always got sketchbooks and pencils for Christmas and birthday presents.”
In her mid-20s, Vance moved to Denver and then, because she’d always loved the mountains, to Winter Park, 9,000-plus feet up and just south of Rocky Mountain National Park. For a decade, she worked at a variety of left-brain day jobs—office manager, town clerk, orthodontics assistant—while keeping her right brain satisfied by painting at home each night. “I just kept working away at it,” she shrugs. She married, moved to California and Washington state to accompany her airline-pilot husband, then divorced. She returned to Winter Park in 1992 having recently turned 40, determined finally to make her way as a full-time painter. “There was no way I was ever going to work for anyone else again,” she decided, “and so I started painting and painting and painting, not to mention studying under some of the best people I knew.”
Sometimes the view from her home alone is enough to give rise to an artwork, such as ROCKY MOUNTAIN SUNSET, which depicts a snow-covered high valley studded with lodgepole pines and, in the background, majestic peaks etched by the fading sun. But Vance doesn’t necessarily need nature on a grand scale to be inspired. Take WILD ROSE, completed from her pochade on a whim in a friend’s garden. “I was waiting for her while she had an appointment, and I sat and painted it in the sun,” Vance recalls. “That was one of the most pleasant mornings I can remember.”
To further the concept that good things should come from her paintings, Vance also donates as much as 15 percent of her sales to raise funds for organizations that benefit the arts, the disabled, and victims of domestic violence. “I feel like I’ve been given so much with this talent,” she explains, “that it’s so gratifying to give back.”
Vance is represented by Angler Art & Gifts, Denver, CO; Big Horn Galleries, Cody, WY, and Tubac, AZ; Bozeman Trail Gallery, Sheridan, WY; Elk Horn Art Gallery, Winter Park, CO; The Sportsman’s Gallery & Paderewski Fine Art, Beaver Creek, CO; and Two Rivers Gallery, Steamboat Springs, CO.
Featured in February 2005
The post Karen Vance | A Natural Calling appeared first on Southwest Art Magazine.