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Aspen
Magazine
The Color of Water
by Jamie
Miller
Summer
2000 issue
I'm not sure if tomatoes can kick butt," laughs Ann Gaechter,
"but if they could, this one would." She's talking about
"The Temerarious Tomato," one of her recent watercolors,
which she'll show at Basalt Gallery July 6-20. And she's right;
bold, steadfast, and menacingly red, the piece of fruit on this
canvas seems somehow on a mission.
It is this approach - the still life instilled with character,
almost humanity - that has recently garnered Gaechter considerable
national attention and acclaim. Since she began using watercolor in
1990 (then painting mostly classic Western images), she has honed
her unusual interpretation - sometimes dark and moody, sometimes
wry, always boldly colorful - of a medium that is best known as
light-infused, carefree, and even washed-out. Take her sunflowers.
"I was in Paonia a few years ago," she recalls, "and
I saw these dead sunflowers on the ground. I was struck by the
poignancy of the scene; they looked like stoic, dying men. That idea
became "After the Glory."
Not your average sunflower scene, indeed, but Gaechter isn't exactly
your average artist. When she and her husband, Bill, came to Aspen
in 1969, it was to ski; he was a Highlands ski patroller, and she
chose jobs that allowed maximum slope time. Now, with two kids in
college, Gaechter has traded in her skis for brushes, spending at
least five mornings a week hard at work in the studio in her Woody
Creek home. "I don't ski as much as I used to," she
admits, utterly without the regret expressed by many Aspenites.
"I'd just rather paint."
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