VAIL, Colorado — EDWARDS — Artist Buddy Calhoun may have passed away in December but his spirit lives on at the Calhoun Ranch in Edwards.

On the wraparound porch of a late 1800s ranch house, four girls thread beads onto necklaces.

Occasionally, a chicken pecks its way toward the porch, and horses graze in the background. It is a sunny, summer day at the 60-acre ranch, where snowpeaked mountains rise in the distance and things move at the pace of a Country Time lemonade commercial.

“It’s so pretty,” 13-year-old Sarah Miller from Denver muses. “It smells kinda funky, though. It’s old and calm. You just want to relax and have fun.”

That’s exactly what Miss Lynne’s art class is doing. The gazelle-like Lynne Perry helps each girl crimp her necklace with a pair of pliers. Wearing a patient smile and a warble of turquoise earrings, this woman who believes in art as therapy has been teaching outdoor art classes at the ranch for five years. Though she looks like she might have once been a model, Perry is in fact the art teacher for kindergartners through eighth-graders at Stone Creek Charter School in Avon.

Perry boards her horses here at the ranch, and that’s how she became close with Calhoun.

Taken to wearing a cowboy hat and boots, he often disappeared into a late-1800s bunkhouse on the ranch to watercolor.

“He’d lock himself into the art studio and you wouldn’t see him for days,” Calhoun’s brother, Gary Calhoun said in an interview outside his cabin at the ranch.

When Calhoun died from natural causes at 61, he left behind a studio full of paintings and ornate knife handles.

He also left behind a generation of local children who had been touched by his lessons. Calhoun loved showing students around the ranch and teaching art classes. Perry remembers how he would get out the hammer and bang leather into crafts.

“He was so authentic and so real,” Perry said. “I believe he inspired kids in a way no one else can, in a different way than I can.”

After Calhoun’s death, children continue to find inspiration at the ranch. Today, Miller strings painted beads into a necklace that would fit in at the trendy shop Anthropologie. Nine-year-old Siena Miller goes for a red, white and blue design.

Perry doesn’t have a set schedule for art classes this summer. Instead she’s been planning classes for group of four or more children whenever she fields a request for it. Most recently she received a call from a parent looking to book a jewelry-making birthday party.

Whether children are making paper or drawing horses at the ranch, they take a cue from Calhoun’s legacy.

“I feel like he’s still around here, inspiring the kids,” Perry said.

Asked about his take on that sentiment, Gary Calhoun looks thoughtfully into the distance.

“He might be caught between two worlds,” he said. “But I don’t know where he’s at. That’s just what I’ve heard.”

High Life Writer Sarah Mausolf can be reached at 970-748-2938 or smausolf@vaildaily.com.