Being allowed to show your work as part of the Red Cliff Studio Tour, taking place this weekend, is a bit of an honor. It's an exclusive club, mainly limited to artists who either live or have studio space in the quirky yet charming little town. This year there are two artists who are not technically Red Cliff residents. Sydney Summers, who lived in Red Cliff for 25 years and now lives in Denver, was “grandmothered in” as she was one of the founders of the event. The other is Joanie Barbier, a fabric artist who lives in Nathrop, near Salida. Barbier was chosen, at least in part, because her work is different from the typical artist media — painting and photography, mostly — you find here in the mountains.

“We always have plenty of painters and didn't want another painter. Many of her scenes are of mountain towns not unlike Red Cliff,” said Barb Bomier, one of the tour's organizers and a friend of Barbier's. “She's simply a prolific artist. She has made her living as an artist her entire life. Everything she does — no matter if it's decorating her home, planting a garden, setting a table — is artistic.”

Barbier started doing fabric collage around 10 years ago, but she was interested in fabric long before that. She studied fabric design at Syracuse University, and while living in Crested Butte, where she owned a gallery, she was a freelance fabric designer represented by an agent in New York.

“I designed sheets and did some things for Samsonite luggage interior,” Barbier said. “I used to buy the sheets back and sell them in my store. I also did some for curtains and bedspreads. I did it for about six years.”

At the time, she was primarily making batiks — cloth that traditionally uses a manual wax-resist dyeing technique — and would send 30-by-30-inch square batik prints to her agent, who would shop the designs around. Eventually the fumes from the technique made her sick, she said, and Bariber attributes her 2001 leukemia diagnosis to the “toxic materials.”

“My head was literally over that wax pan,” she said. “I lived in a mountain cabin with no exhaust fan and would sit in a tiny room that would fill up with a white cloud from the gas.”

So Barbier switched mediums.

“All the fabrics I own and could buy, I compiled them into landscape pictures — snow scenes and Colorado landscapes,” she said.

Now all it takes to complete her work is fabric scraps, “a sewing machine, an iron and a good pair of scissors,” she said. That and Barbier's keen eye for design.

Along with original, large-scale collages, Barbier will sell giclee prints of her work, handpainted and stenciled clothing and notecards at the old schoolhouse in Red Cliff this weekend.

High Life Editor Caramie Schnell can be reached at 970-748-2984 or cschnell@vaildaily.com.