Featured Artists Juanita Nelson and Rebecca Koeppen

JUANITA NELSON

“Some of my earliest memories as a child are watching my Mother mix paints and colors and seeing her apply them to canvas. I heard words like alizarin crimson and burnt sienna and was taught the colors they resented. I smelled turpentine and saw her create textures with brushes, palate knives, and hands. I loved playing with her tools and on occasion put paint to paper myself. I inhaled art like oxygen until it went deep into my psyche and buried itself into my perception of the world. I have always tapped into that ingrained source of creativity and utilized it in my everyday endeavors. Striving to create beauty around me in a variety of ways has always been an important component of my personality. I love seeing how nature combines color and texture and form, but have no desire to compete with the perfection around us. Rather, I get to interpret nature and express it in my own much more humble style.I have always focused on the creative process and it has been expressed in a variety of ways including jewelry making, interior design, and my professional life. The past few years my creativity has been primarily centered around pastel painting. Painting with pastels has been a wonderful medium in my exploration of the natural world around me. I love working with pure pigments and seeing shapes and forms develop. When I’m painting the practical world falls away and I am immersed in the beauty of nature. Time and schedules disappear and I get to tap into the abundant flow of creativity that is all around us. I have found community connections as a member of the Pastel Society of New Mexico, Pastel Society of Colorado, Red Rock Pastel Society of Nevada, and our local critique group The Looking Glass Collective. I have been fortunate to be included in several local and national shows and been honored with awards.” -Juanita

see more of Juanita’s work at juanitanelsonartist.com

REBECCA KOEPPEN

After high school, Rebecca attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY for one year. Then Pan America Art School in Manhattan, NY for 2 years and finally spent a year at the Art Institute of Boston.

Her education then took the form of traveling the US in a pick-up truck camper with her husband at the time. Always drawn to America’s places of natural beauty, she lived in the redwood forests of northern California and the mountains outside of Boulder, Colorado before returning to the east coast to live on Cape Cod, start family life and a career as a Wholistic Health professional specializing in Classical Homeopathy, Subconscious Imagery Healing and Dream Analysis, which she continues. Art ended up on the sidelines.

Always feeling called back to the mountains, in 1999 she moved with her husband Gary Wallace and daughter India to Ignacio, Colorado. In January 2005 she was unexpectedly tapped again by the art-muse and has been consumed by pastel painting (a new medium for her) ever since. Her extensive travels and hours spent in the high mountain back-country and red rock canyons of the 4-Corners region yield endless inspiration. Moving water has become a particular area of interest. Sunlight shining on the surface of rivers and streams and shining through onto the colorful rocks below the water is a mysterious beauty. Capturing in a painting the graceful shapes of continually changing fluidity and color-gradients created by changing water depth and the degree of shade or light levels is an endless fascination. She works to translate into a painting the powerful experience of being in the presence of crashing white-water with its airborne droplets lit up like flying jewels. Documenting through art the fragile and endangered water-ways of the American southwest is an accepted challenge.

Each year since she began painting in 2005 she has had work accepted into local and national juried exhibitions where it has received awards. She is a member of the Pastel Society of Colorado and a signature-member of the Pastel Society of New Mexico. Her paintings have been printed as posters for the La Plata Open Space Conservancy and the Durango Chamber of Commerce.

Writing from: Rebbeca Koeppen, “Bio” accessed August 21, 2021, http://www.rebeccasartwork.net/artist-bio.html

See more of Rebecca’s work at www.rebeccasartwork.net