Posted for Nancy Yearout
RE/MAX Properties of the Summit, Breckenridge, Colorado
nyearout@colorado.net
http://www.realestate-breckenridge.net
#Breckenridge, Colorado
Nearly everyone who's ever taken a car trip, knows that song, the one about how
many bottles of beer are still on the wall. Most of us just hum or belt out a
few rounds and leave it at that. Not Ceil Horowitz, however. She has taken it
one step forward, using it as inspiration for her latest artistic project,
entitled 100 Bottles of Colorado Beer.
Horowitz, an artist hailing from
Colorado Springs, embarked on her ambitious project in November of 2012. Her
plan is to visit every brewery in Colorado that bottles its own beer — she
claims 80 in total — and paint at least one picture of the bottle, brewery and
people at each one. At the end, she intends to have a collection of 100 such
paintings. So far, she has completed 47, with just over half to go.
While
it might sound very simple to paint a picture of a beer bottle, Horowitz's
paintings and process are not. While each painting features a beer bottle at its
center, the background is a complex spread of varied and specific details. Not
content with simply painting the product, Horowitz works to infuse the
atmosphere and personality of each brewery into her artwork. She spends up to 10
hours a day at one site, looking at the equipment, watching the people nearby,
both brewers and customers. At one brewery, for instance, she painted the
portrait of a family that had stopped by for the afternoon, kindly waiting
around for three hours while she sketched and painted them.
After 10 or
so hours in one place, “The mood of the brewery just starts to come out,”
Horowitz said.
She's also interested in preserving a particular moment
in each brewery, how everything looked and how everyone acted during the moment
that she was there.
“I want it to be a little bit of history,” she
explained.
For each brewery, Horowitz selects interesting or unique
aspects about architecture, equipment, people or even the host town, to
supplement the painting's background. At the Dillon Dam Brewery, for instance,
she plans to focus on the brewery's label maker, an elaborate-looking machine
from 1914. At the Breckenridge Brewery and Backcountry Brewery, Horowitz chose
to paint each buildings' architecture and individual atmosphere.
Horowitz isn't visiting Pub Ryan's Steakhouse and Brewery this trip,
because they use cans instead of bottles. However, she plans to be back once
this project is over, to give the breweries that prefer cans over bottles their
due.
Each painting only uses up to seven different colors. Horowitz
paints them onto watercolor paper, using acrylic paints. Her style is colorful
and abstract. She likes to use color to show depth, she said, rather than light
and shadow. To demonstrate, she picks one painting and covers a swath of color
with her finger. Like an optical illusion, the piece changes and seems to adjust
before the eyes.
Beer has not often been an artistic subject for
Horowitz, however. She has spent much of her time painting people, particularly
musicians found in the subways of New York City. The beer idea came when she
returned to Colorado Springs from a visit to New York. Wanting to start a new
project but not particularly thrilled about spending hours in the studio alone,
Horowitz, who has many brewer friends, hit upon the idea of beer. The decision
to make 100 paintings was to create a challenge.
Though she said she
doesn't drink a lot of beer, she does enjoy it from time to time. She's also a
large proponent of supporting local food and crafts.
“I really believe
you should buy local and support local,” she said.
During her travels
among breweries in the past few months, Horowitz said she has been impressed
with the sense of friendship and community between brewers in
Colorado.
“There's a lot of camaraderie between different breweries,” she
said. “It's a family, it's not a lot of different companies
competing.”
Horowitz said she hasn't quite decided how she's going to
display her project after it's done. She may consider prints, or even publishing
all the paintings into a book. She's also interested in potentially working with
the Denver Art Museum and the Dillon Dam Brewery's special Van Gogh beer, or
perhaps displaying the installation at the next Great American Beer Festival in
Denver. But all that is for the future. Right now, Horowitz is just focusing on
her art.
“The process is more important than the product,” she said. “I
just put myself in a situation and let it happen.”
Not having everything
figured out doesn't faze her at all. In fact, she seems to thrive on
it.
“It's just an unknown,” she said. “And that's what's fun with it.”
