Grand Bohemian Gallery’s eclectic collection

Housed in the Beaver Creek Lodge, the serene Bohemian Gallery is the perfect place to relax and let the beauty of the artwork take you away. The gallery has a stable of ten artists — all of them noteworthy — who work in various mediums and genres.

Jean-Claude Roy, who describes his style as “expressionistic-colorist,” works in oils and mostly with a palette knife. Roy, who divides his time between Newfoundland and France, recalls going to early morning produce markets with his grandparents and making his first sculptures from the colored paper used to wrap apples and oranges.

Roy prefers to work outdoors, even in freezing weather. He paints each day and in the evening drives through the countryside, choosing a spot for the next day. Since the late 1980s, a characteristic of his landscapes has been the presence of the sun. Since Roy found that putting a sun in his paintings — initially a black sun — added light to his paintings, he now considers it to be an important part of each work’s composition.

The ability to visualize and chronicle an entire scene beyond the frame is the magic of Thomas Arvid’s paintings. Using lush color and adroit composition, Arvid likes to tell a story of enjoyment and the good life.

Arvid, who is passionate about art and wine — a collector of both — strives to capture the pleasure of a life well lived on each canvas. “Wine is a great subject because people are familiar with it,” says Arvid. “They really connect with it. My paintings are really the landscapes between people sharing wine.”

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Many influential wineries collect Arvid’s work, as they feel he translates the craftsmanship of wine to the canvas. “Doug Shafer, of Shafer Family Vineyards, likens Arvid’s skill to that of a winemaker. “Arvid’s style is big and bold, with enough selected detail and softness to create a sense of balance,” says Shafer. “This blend of elements is precisely what winemakers hope to bring to their top vintages.”

The newest artist to the gallery’s collection is Shen, a self-taught artist. Having tagged, “ShenShen210” in the mid-‘80s, Shen was the first female graffiti artist in the San Francisco Area when the movement was just beginning. In the early nineties she exchanged her spray cans for the airbrush and was named one of the nation’s “Top 19” airbrush talents. Since then, Shen, whose work can be seen in several museums, including the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, has evolved into a more traditional media, blending all of her earlier passion, style and techniques that can best be describes as PopRealism.

Now a resident of the Vail Valley, Shen’s winning poster design was chosen to represent Beaver Creek for the 2012 Pro Cycling Challenge.