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Harmony is achieved among young artists

By Sara MillerTuesday, June 1, 2010 at 5:00 pm

Barbara Wright is a mild-mannered, gentle spirit whose interests run from quantum physics to international business. Her true passions,

however, are the horses that she tends to at Harmony Horseworks, her Conifer-based horse sanctuary, and art specifically, her acrylic

and oil paintings, which frequently have her beloved horses as the subject.

Wright recently shared her knowledge of art with a new generation of budding Picassos through Rocky Mountain Academys KidArt

program. Each year, professional artists visit RMAE to share their skills with students in every grade. This year, Wright worked with the

second-grade students in Karen Hines class to create a dazzling acrylic work that will be auctioned off at RMAEs annual fund-raiser on

Feb. 19.

The students had been studying Native Americans as part of their curriculum, so I wanted to create something that would build upon

this knowledge, Wright says. Recently Ive been working in the style of French artist Henri Matisse. I realized that his later work was

something that the students could emulate.

During the last 14 years of Matisses life, following a serious operation, Matisse found himself wheelchair-bound. Rather than giving up

his painting, Matisse developed a new painting style known as gouaches dcoups or paper cut-outs. Matisse prepared colorful sheets

of paper and, using scissors, meticulously cut out shapes, both abstract and figurative. Matisse supervised from his wheelchair as his

assistant pinned each cutout in the location of the artists choice. Matisse called it painting with scissors, and these large-scale

canvases became some of the most admired and influential works of his entire career.

Here in Evergreen, Wright taught the students about the later work of Matisse and guided them through painting sheets of canvas with

colorful acrylic paint. The students traced templates of shapes often used in Plains Indian art. The result, after the students went to work

with their scissors, was a pile of vivid buffalo, coyotes, tepees and eagles. The students worked together to lay their cutouts on a

stretched canvas, creating a scene reminiscent of Native American petroglyphs.

We did two sessions with the artwork, and then on the last day we did a lesson on the Plains Indians, Wright says. We talked about

how these particular Indians didnt have a written language, so much of the storytelling was done through this lexicons of symbols. They

learned about the four directions, the four colors and the four influences that were so prevalent in Native American culture. All of these

influences translated into these pieces of art that the students created.

The final piece, titled Harmony, in honor of Wrights herd at the sanctuary as well as the harmony and spirit of the Plains Indians, is a

triptych. Three canvases work together as one final piece to depict a circle of Indian tepees flanked by a herd of horses on one side and

the wild herd of buffalo on the other side.

Wrights collaborative piece, titled Harmony, will be up for live auction on Friday, Feb. 19 at the seventh annual A Night for the

Academy fund-raiser at the Evergreen Country Day Event Center in from 6 to 11 p.m. For more information or to purchase tickets,

contact Anita Hanson at 970-390-5354.

To see more of Barbara Wrights own work, including new paintings created in the style of Matisse, Degas and Pollock, to name a few,

visit the Wild Eye Gallery in downtown Evergreen. For more information on Wrights sanctuary, Harmony Horseworks, visit

www.harmonyhorseworks.com.

Sara Miller, a freelance writer and a resident of Evergreen, lives with her husband, two children and a dog.

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