Ann Korologos Gallery presents Off the Beaten Path, a group exhibition depicting nature through abstraction and mood through the paintings and mixed media art of Michael Kessler, Deborah Paris, Brett Scheifflee, Allison Stewart, and Marie Figge Wise. The exhibition is on view at Ann Korologos Gallery in Basalt, Colorado August 18 through September 14, 2022 and virtually at korologosgallery.com.

“Off the Beaten Path refers to the places these artists have taken their view and experience of the landscape,” shares gallery owner, Ann Korologos. “Deeply connected to nature, they explore light, mood, majesty, love, loss, and beauty across the range of realism to abstraction.”

Michael Kessler is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Kessler’s mixed-media work honors the inner dynamics of the natural world, depicting effects of time like the pattern of a river bed, erosion of sandstone, the scars of tree bark, layers of slate upended by movement across millennia. His abstract, layered panels combine the fluidity of water colored with pigment, and layers of acrylic in palettes that reflect the colors of nature.

Deborah Paris is a Texas-based American landscape painter whose work reflects an intense, intuitive connection to the natural world and its rhythms. The time spent in the Aspen groves of Colorado and the woods of Texas inspires the artist’s work. Based on a foundation of intense observation, drawing, memory and imagination, as well as indirect painting techniques, Deborah Paris produces luminous works full of mystery and mood. 

Brett Scheifflee lives in his home state of New York, returning after living in the Roaring Fork Valley in 2012, after which he found representation by Ann Korologos Gallery as an “emerging artist.” A decade later, Scheifflee’s tightly painted, highly detailed realist landscape paintings informed by his study of drawing, illustration, and art history have earned him a national reputation. The soft light, simple composition, careful detail, and uber realism of Scheifflee’s oil paintings enthrall his collectors.

Allison Stewart shares her time between New Orleans, Louisiana and Snowmass, Colorado. Stewart’s abstract nature impressions are based on stories of restoration, cultivation, and conservation in both the natural world and her life and they often intersect. In her abstract style, Stewart paints visual diaries of her emotions about a landscape, about “nature in the act of becoming, nature in the act of changing, of altering itself or being altered,” according to the artist. Her paintings reflect the duality of substance and spirit, image and impression, observation and memory.

Marie Figge Wise is based in both Texas and Colorado. Formerly a still-life painter, Wise was driven to paint landscapes through her desire to combine her passion for travel, the outdoors, and love of art. The diffused, tonal quality of Wise’s work encourages the viewer to slow down and feel the calm, quiet of the moment captured on Wise’s canvas.  Art has always influenced Figge Wise’s life, cultivated at first by her family’s involvement with Davenport’s Figge Art Museum, and later pursued through her studies at The Art Students League of New York, Anderson Ranch in Snowmass, CO and art history in Italy.

Off the Beaten Path is on view August 18 through September 14, 2022 at Ann Korologos Gallery and virtually at korologosgallery.com. For more information, please visit the Ann Korologos Gallery at 211 Midland Avenue in Basalt, call 970.927.9668 or email art@korologosgallery.com.