The Oh-Be-Joyful Gallery opened in November of 2007 in the heart of Crested Butte’s historic downtown retail district. The gallery was capitalized by the sale of Shaun Horne’s large-scale plein air paintings. Shaun had been painting around Crested Butte for five years at that time and brought a significant annual sales figure and fair momentum to the project.
The Oh-Be-Joyful Gallery was created chiefly in response to the need for a marketing effort on Shaun's behalf that would reflect his high production, sales, and technical success to the national market. While there are a few preexisting art galleries in Crested Butte (including the Rijks Family Gallery, Shaun’s representative for his first five years in Crested Butte), none were suited to the job of presenting Shaun’s mantelpiece plein air landscapes to both the local and national market.
We see a great opportunity for the Oh-Be-Joyful Gallery to expand our already enthusiastic regional patronage for Shaun Horne and Dawn Cohen's sparkling, large plein air landscapes. We hope to extend this market by importing excellent paintings by established and emerging artists from outside of Crested Butte and through ambitious national advertising in top art magazines.
Philosophically, Shaun is imposing certain parameters on the gallery based on his observations of the American gallery system and his own biases. The Oh-Be-Joyful Gallery will be specializing in high caliber realist landscape paintings. Crested Butte, arguably the most beautiful mountain playground in the US, is a natural landscape market. Shaun furthermore believes that a gallery succeeds best when it has a coherent vision of what it stands for. This gallery seeks to present the beauty of Earth’s landscape captured by the most diligent painting effort.
The gallery will seek to represent a small number of the finest landscape painters in early and mid career working today. By giving these “golden goose” artists a better return on their efforts, in the form of national advertising, the gallery hopes to eventually gain a central and prestigious position in the national art market.
The Oh-Be-Joyful Gallery will scrupulously adhere to acting in the best interests of the artists we represent. This functionally will mean immediate payment to artists, higher percentages of sales going to the artist than typical and heavy advertising return on sales. We seek to make positive noise for top artists in the process of selling a portion of their best work. Philosophically we hope that by helping our artists in the broadest possible way (with or without immediate financial return) we will gain a return in the future in the form of our past and present artists referring to the gallery the next generation of important landscape painters.
The Oh-Be-Joyful Gallery, while seeking to sell the finest landscape paintings will strive to maintain approachability to everybody, as befits the character of Crested Butte. All eyes are welcome here and we hope you will consider us as a source if you are ever in the position to buy quality original landscape paintings. You are welcome to come look at our offering of paintings at length until then.
The Oh-Be-Joyful Gallery was named after an exquisite valley near Crested Butte, a place of waterfalls and profound alpine topography. |
