American Dream: Rocky Mountain High<\/a>\u201d showing at the Aspen Art Museum beginning Saturday and running through May 24.<\/p>\n Courtesy of Aspen Art Museum<\/p>\n
Mayerson brings a comic-strip sensibility to his work \u2014 not in a visual sense but in a narrative way. Each work functions like a panel in a comic strip, designed to interact with the other pieces to tell a larger story.<\/p>\n
The Aspen show features 25 pieces done with oil painting on linen and one sculpture of Snoopy from \u201cPeanuts.\u201d The subjects all have some connection to Colorado and most are Aspen-centric, spanning decades from Aspen\u2019s early mining days to its countercultural heyday in the 1960s and \u201970s, to the present day.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cKeith Mayerson\u2019s work captures a side of Aspen that natives and locals know but that is often less visible to visitors,\u201d said Simone Krug, who co-curated the exhibition with museum Chief Curator Daniel Merritt. \u201cWorking from his own experience and archival images, Mayerson showcases celebrated aspects of Aspen\u2019s history and landscape. It\u2019s an honor to have Mayerson continue his \u2018My American Dream\u2019 series in a way that will resonate so personally for our Roaring Fork community.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cultural icons are also featured in the exhibition. In one piece, John Denver rows down a river in a raft with Jim Henson\u2019s muppets. The painting is not just a collision of \u201970s icons, on a deeper level it marks the conversion of two artists who equally promoted empathy, environmental awareness and communal responsibility.<\/p>\n
Mayerson was personally inspired by Hunter S. Thompson. In creating a piece on the Gonzo journalist for the show, he listened to audiobooks and interviews of Thompson in an effort to channel the writer\u2019s energy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Mayerson likens the extensive research he puts into every piece to method acting in which he aims to capture not just an image, but the aura and essence of the subject.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A homecoming<\/p>\n
Mayerson\u2019s work has been displayed all over the country but this is his first solo show in Colorado.He described it as a kind of homecoming that is the most personal show he has ever done.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In addition to weaving in childhood memories from his home state, he lost his mother while working on the pieces featured in the exhibit.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cSince my mom passed, I\u2019ve been listening to her favorite music, a lot of Ella Fitzgerald, and I feel like I\u2019m dancing in a non-denominational heaven with my mom,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A lifelong skier, Mayerson compared painting to making turns on the mountain.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cPainting is like skiing because there is this mind-body connection,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen you\u2019re skiing, you\u2019re hopefully inspired by the sublime nature and being in wilderness, but your body\u2019s doing its own separate thing.<\/p>\n
\u201cLike skiing, when I\u2019m painting, I\u2019m really feeling every curve and form that I’m doing in my mind\u2019s eye, like anticipating a fall line and making those turns or bouncing off moguls. I\u2019m transcending into the landscape or whatever it is that I\u2019m rendering, it feels very much like skiing.\u201d<\/p>\n
When asked how he thinks the Aspen Idea of mind, body and spirit has endured over the last 80 years since it was first propagated by Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke, Mayerson was optimistic.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAspen has changed,\u201d he acknowledged. \u201cBut I don\u2019t think its essential spirit is lost. The intersection of nature, art and culture is still there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mayerson hopes visitors to the show will not only reflect on Aspen\u2019s past, but be uplifted by the present and future.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope that people really receive from the show some visions of the past and the present in the context of the Aspen Idea, and that it renews their own spirit as they think about the philosophy, music, art, culture and sublime beauty of Aspen so they can renew other people\u2019s spirits. The hope is to move forward to a more progressive democratic and harmonious future.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Artist and teacher Keith Mayerson grew up on the Front Range. He visited Aspen in his youth and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":339713,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-339712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=339712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339712\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/339713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=339712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=339712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}