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Visiting the upcoming Eagle County art fairs? Let us help you find local artists

The next two weekends hold the Avon Arts Celebration and Beaver Creek Art Festival. If you're planning to attend, go seek out these Eagle County artists

The 2023 Avon Arts Celebration will return to Harry A. Nottingham Park this upcoming weekend, July 29-30, to share over 100 open air galleries with locals and visitors.
Jon Resnick/Courtesy photo

The next two weekends hold back-to-back fine arts events for Eagle County. This upcoming weekend, July 29 and 30, the Avon Arts Celebration will take place in the Harry A. Nottingham Park. The following weekend, Aug. 4-6, the Beaver Creek Art Festival will alight upon the Beaver Creek Plaza. Both open-air art fairs will feature over 100 fine artists across numerous mediums, whose home locations span the country (and Canada). Both fairs will also present local Eagle County artists, who can be hard to find amongst the crowd without knowing who they are in advance. Keep reading to learn more about local artists who will be at one or both events.

Local Avon painter Max Rowe will be sharing his skiing-inspired paintings at the upcoming Avon Arts Celebration and Beaver Creek Art Festival.
Max Rowe/Courtesy photo

Max Rowe

  • Hometown: Avon
  • Medium: Painting
  • Location(s): Avon Arts Celebration, Beaver Creek Art Festival

For Max Rowe, art and skiing have always been essential, intertwined parts of his life. Rowe grew up in Denver, spending weekends skiing in Vail, studied studio art at C.U. Boulder, and skied as much as he could, working as a ski instructor and guide. “I enter a similar state of mind when I’m painting and when I’m skiing, and so I really love to merge those two things together because they’re both really important to me,” Rowe said.

This is the first year the Avon-based painter has shown his work at art-specific shows, and it has been exceptionally well-received. “You can feel the texture and see the colors in a different way. The way that they play in the light, and there’s a physical energy that is embedded in the paintings as well. I love people absorbing that and taking on the inspiration,” Rowe said.



At other Colorado arts fairs this summer, Rowe has noticed that his work, which features bright colors and images of skiers, has been exceptionally exciting to children. “It makes me immeasurably happy to think about having the ski paintings in their rooms, and getting them excited and inspired all year long. And then when the winter rolls around, every year, they’re going to continue to improve and grow as skiers and as people. And I feel honored to be able to provide any kind of inspiration to the youth,” Rowe said.

Adults and children alike should look out for Rowe’s work at the Avon Arts Celebration and Beaver Creek Art Festival if they want to maintain their connection to skiing year-round. “I love having ski art on my own walls, because it keeps me inspired all year long, and it’s been cool to be able to share that inspiration with other people. Now, they can have it in their homes and get super stoked for the winter,” Rowe said.

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Edwards-based painter Margo Thomas is always growing in her art, which started with human figure drawing, and evolved to abstract landscapes, such as this award-winning piece, entitled “Edwards in Autumn.”
Margo Thomas/Courtesy photo

Margo Thomas

  • Hometown: Edwards
  • Medium: Painting
  • Location(s): Avon Arts Celebration, Beaver Creek Art Festival

Margo Thomas, who first moved to the valley in 1982, and has been living in Edwards full-time since 2010, said that her art is “always influenced by the views in Edwards.” An avid skier who learned to ski after moving to Vail at age 22 and working for Vail Associates, Thomas finds inspiration in the fall and winter landscapes of Eagle County.

“I started out in human figure drawing. That was my passion for years and years and years,” she said. About five years ago, Thomas made the switch to abstract landscapes, and her style of art is ever-evolving. “For this year, I feel like my art has matured in a different direction, and a direction I didn’t really expect. When I was in the Eagle Art Show a couple of weeks ago, I showed a series of landscape oil paintings, and I had way more interest in those than I thought I would,” she said.

Thomas uses her interactions with visitors at the art fairs to grow and change as an artist. “Inspiration (comes) by looking out my front door, but inspiration (also comes from) talking with people, and understanding what their interests are, and then I try to create along those lines, and that creates a different level of art,” she said.

Visitors who have encountered Thomas’ booth in previous years at the local art shows will have the chance to see a new wave of art from Thomas at the 2023 Avon Arts Celebration and Beaver Creek Art Festival. “What I hope to do is have that next level of art year after year, so that there’s that fresh look each year. That might look chaotic, or people might think it’s chaotic, but it’s really that growth pattern,” Thomas said.

Tara Novak, a painter based out of Eagle, said that her signature series is winter aspens, meant to inspire the same feeling in others that she has when snowboarding through the trees on a powder day.
Tara Novak/Courtesy photo

Tara Novak

  • Hometown: Eagle
  • Medium: Painting
  • Location(s): Avon Arts Celebration

Tara Novak, a painter and former professional snowboarder who has lived in Eagle County since 1994, uses her passion for the outdoors and her professional painting expertise in her art. “Even though my artwork doesn’t necessarily look just like snowboarders flying around the mountain, it’s inspired by the feeling of being in the trees, and being in nature, and the respect for mother nature and the mountains, and all the different manifestations of our environment and how things change, from season to season and with storms and natural occurrences,” Novak said.

Novak works as a painter in two ways; in addition to her fine art, she has run a faux painting business for 25 years, assisting in construction sites by camouflaging and blending walls. “Part of my artwork is that I’ve taken those materials and mediums that I use in the painting business, and I’ve started applying them to canvas, to get different layered effects textures, little pops of metallics, little glitter, glimmers, things like that. And just developing my own style using those mediums that I would normally use in people’s homes on their walls. I have a little different, nontraditional method to my artwork and how I present it,” Novak said.

Novak’s signature series is her winter aspens, taken from her snowboarding experiences—though she now rides for fun, she is also a former professional snowboarder who competed in the 2007 Burton U.S. Open. “One of my favorite places to be, and just have a moment, is up in Beaver Creek, on a beautiful powder day. (Everything is) blue sky, and sparkly, and you go bounding through the powder, through the glades, and stopping for a few minutes, and just taking it in, and how beautiful it is, there’s a serenity and peace that’s there that you can’t find in some other places. That’s the feeling that I hope that people feel when they see my aspens,” Novak said.

Kimberly Reed specializes in completely handmade, hand sandblasted, and hand painted metal and glass boxes.
Kimberly Reed/Courtesy photo

Kimberly Reed

  • Hometown: Eagle
  • Medium: Glass/metalwork
  • Location(s): Avon Arts Celebration

Eagle resident Kimberly Reed is entering her 27th year of making glass art. Originally lured to Eagle County to work at the (now defunct) Vail Valley Times, Reed took a stained-glass class at Colorado Mountain College, and within a year had made art her full-time career. Her designs consist of delicately constructed glass and metal boxes, with hand-painted designs on the top.

“The thing that is unique about my work is it is completely handmade from scratch. Every bead and texture metalwork that you see, I make one at a time, from melted metals. The images that you see on the tops of the boxes, it’s all hand sandblasted,” Reed said.

Since becoming a full-time artist, she has traveled throughout the West in her trailer, sharing her art with the world through art fairs. The boxes are three-dimensional, reflective, and clear, and the best way to understand them, she said, is to experience them in person. “I’m not a retail store, I’m an artist,” Reed said.

Through years of trial and error, Reed has refined her craft almost to a science. When asked how long it takes her to make one of her boxes, she said, “In general, I tell people, it’s an hour to three hours, plus 20 years. My first piece took me several hours to make, and I remember when I first started out, it was ‘don’t talk to me, don’t bump the table.’ Now I can solder in my trailer, with the wind blowing, and rocking back and forth. I don’t have to think about it, but it took many, many years to get to that level of skill,” Reed said.

Reed encouraged visitors planning to attend the Avon Arts Celebration to, “stop in, see me, come get the whole box feel. I’ll tell you all about it.”

A little more on the festivals themselves

The Avon Arts Celebration is a collaboration between the town of Avon and Colorado-based art show coordinator Darren Skanson. The event, which will take place in Harry A. Nottingham Park from 10 a.m. through 5 p.m. on July 29-30, has been happening since the summer of 2020, and has persevered through the pandemic, as well as the Avon mudslide of 2021. “There is no more beautiful location than the park in front of the bandstand in Avon. The lake is there, the mountains are on either side of you, the grass is green and beautiful. It is the location for an art festival. The grass between your toes, a drink in your hand. I can’t think of a better way to spend a weekend Saturday or Sunday,” Skanson said. This year, in addition to the wide variety of fine artists, visitors will have the opportunity to taste, purchase, and consume wine and other alcoholic beverages as they stroll amongst the booths.

The Beaver Creek Art Festival is celebrating its 35th year in 2023. The event will take place Aug. 4-6, beginning at 10 a.m. and running through 6 p.m. on the first day, and 5 p.m. over the weekend. “Between the galleries, the shops, the mountain, and the lift in the background, it makes for a really special weekend,” said Howard Alan, who has been the promoter of the festival since it began.


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