Mountain bikes are being hauled up Silver Star as the resort gets ready for its official summer opening this week.
Also opening is Gallery Odin’s annual summer exhibition.
Located on Silver Star’s knoll, Odin is featuring the works of 22 artists, with paintings, sculpture, ceramic works and more that reflect the diverse range of artistic talent in the Okanagan and B.C., said Maria Molnar, who runs the gallery with her husband Kalman.
“This year we are featuring three different artists in our three rooms. Each has an individual and unique feel,” said Molnar. “They each produce very different work.”
In one room is Sara Lige’s Every Picture Tells a Story.
The Kelowna artist’s work at Odin signals her return to the studio and her first exhibition since graduating with her master’s in art from UBC Okanagan in 2012.
The work features monoprints and mixed media, many of which use a leaf motif.
“Thematically, my work reflects basic life issues —emotion, spirituality and memory. It is inner-directed art created out of my thoughts and personal experience,” said Lige, who is the founder of Cool Arts for artists with disabilities.
Julia Trops is a returning artist to Odin who will be showing her stylized abstract landscapes in The Journey.
The Kelowna-based artist just returned from an artist residency in Can Serrat, just outside of Barcelona, Spain, where she says she was inspired by the mountainous landscape, with its olive groves and almond trees.
Trops, who is the founder of the Erotic Art Show, about to be held at Vernon’s Sparkling Hill Resort, used a tactile process in the resulting paintings from her residency.
“I painted with my hands and fingers,” she said. “I liked the immediacy, the direct contact with paint, feeling it between my fingers, seeing each stroke on the canvas, shaping with light and colour. I layered colour upon colour, creating vibrations and relationships, some jarring and some in harmony, just like human interactions.”
Lake Country artist Julie Elliot’s Union Of Opposites features 18 large geometric abstracts in bold colours.
“My process starts with a word, a phrase or an idea that resonates with me and invites exploration,” she said. “I then listen to the work as I weave together loose spontaneous layers with layers that are carefully considered.”
Elliot, who showed her Buy B.C. installation on the Okanagan apple industry at the 2011 ArtWalk, says she has been preoccupied with the union of opposites, both as a concept to explore and as a process for painting.
“I’m striving for paintings that are both complex and simple, meaningful for me and open-ended for the viewer, painted with abandon and built slowly over time with much reflection. I’m fully engaged as I try to achieve balance between these opposites,” she said.
Other Odin artists showing their work this summer include Bonnie Anderson, Glenn Clark, Colleen Couves, Karel Doruyter, Edward Epp, Leonhard Epp, Lynne Grillmair, Ginny Hall, Peter Lawson, Jerry R. Markham, Debby Merkel, Elizabeth Moore, Destanne Norris, Lisa Prowse, Barry Rafuse, Dana Roman, Al Scott, Todd R. White, Deborah Wilson, and Charlene Woodbury.
Odin will also be participating in the Summer Wine Festival, which is returning to Silver Star Resort Aug. 9 and 10.
The gallery will set up a space in Silver Star’s Snowsports School and will feature six artists, including Trops, Rafuse, Moore, Clark, Norris, and Wendy Penner painting on site. The six pieces will go up for silent auction. Other works by regional artists will also be shown.
This week’s opening reception for Odin’s summer exhibition is Thursday from 6 to 10 p.m. and Saturday from 2 to 6 p.m. The gallery will be open during summer Thursdays and Saturdays from 2 to 6 p.m. or call 250-503-0822 to make an appointment.
A virtual tour of the gallery can be seen at galleryodin.com.
