Opening Friday, July 24th
At an intersection of environmental values, Katherine and Tracy's work converses about the importance of preservation of wildlife and wildlands. Both inspired by travel, nature, adventure, and encounters with wild animals and the need to protect them, the styles in which they depict these inspirations couldn't be more different.
Katherine has built a following on her unique use of line, shape, and bold, saturated colors, painted in watercolor on sustainably sourced wood. The larger shapes in her stylized paintings - outlined in pen and ink - are interspersed with the smallest of surprising patterned details that add extra moments of interest to something as seemingly simple as a flower petal, an aspen trunk, the side of a mountain, or the feathers of a bird.
Tracy, also working in ink and watercolor, but with the addition of gouache, uses several built up layers of color on aquabord - a board prepared specifically for use with water media - to create her stylized, yet realistic pieces. Drawn to detail, accurate proportions, and occasional pops of color, she strives to create pieces that feel both real, and uniquely her own.
Katherine Homes
Katherine Homes Sonoran Desert
watercolor and ink, 16 x 20 oil
$7,800
This piece is a tribute to emperor penguins, the largest of all penguins. In the foreground, a parent bends low over its chicks, part of a crèche of young huddled together for warmth while adults take turns foraging at sea. I also wanted to capture porpoising, where penguins build up speed underwater and burst through the surface in a single leap to catch a breath mid-air - the closest these flightless birds get to flight, shown here in the figure leaping on the left. Emperor penguins were declared endangered in 2026, as the sea ice they depend on to breed, feed, and molt keeps breaking up earlier each year. Painting them here, whole and thriving in their icy world, felt like both a celebration and a quiet plea to protect what's left of it.
I wanted to capture the geometry of their world - jagged, faceted planes of blue, teal, and white built up in stacked layers, the way real ice fractures and refracts light rather than reflecting it as one flat surface. That layering carries through the whole piece: the meltwater channels shift between deep navy and pale seafoam, the ice shelf reads almost like stained glass, and even the snow underfoot is built from dozens of overlapping blues rather than plain white - closer to how ice actually looks in Antarctic light, never a single color but many at once. Against all that cold complexity, a warm sand-toned sky offers the one plane of stillness.
This piece is a tribute to emperor penguins, the largest of all penguins. In the foreground, a parent bends low over its chicks, part of a crèche of young huddled together for warmth while adults take turns foraging at sea. I also wanted to capture porpoising, where penguins build up speed underwater and burst through the surface in a single leap to catch a breath mid-air - the closest these flightless birds get to flight, shown here in the figure leaping on the left. Emperor penguins were declared endangered in 2026, as the sea ice they depend on to breed, feed, and molt keeps breaking up earlier each year. Painting them here, whole and thriving in their icy world, felt like both a celebration and a quiet plea to protect what's left of it.
I wanted to capture the geometry of their world - jagged, faceted planes of blue, teal, and white built up in stacked layers, the way real ice fractures and refracts light rather than reflecting it as one flat surface. That layering carries through the whole piece: the meltwater channels shift between deep navy and pale seafoam, the ice shelf reads almost like stained glass, and even the snow underfoot is built from dozens of overlapping blues rather than plain white - closer to how ice actually looks in Antarctic light, never a single color but many at once. Against all that cold complexity, a warm sand-toned sky offers the one plane of stillness.
These pieces began with a walk through Kebler Pass, home to one of Colorado's largest aspen groves - a single root system sending up over 47,000 genetically identical stems that all turn gold together each fall. I wanted the paintings to hold the quiet architecture of the trunks, leaning and crossing like natural stained glass, against the wild color of a mountain sunset bleeding through the gaps in the branches. The dark "eyes" scattered across the bark are real - scars left by old branches - almost watchful, like the forest looking back. Beneath the color and composition of each piece, it's also about fragility: aspens are thin-barked and vulnerable to a warming, drying climate, and across the West, sudden aspen decline has killed entire stands within just a few years. Kebler's grove has fared better than most so far, but it isn't untouched. Painting it ablaze with color felt like a way of honoring something that won't necessarily look like this forever.
Tracy Schwartz
Tracy Schwartz Mutually Beneficial
ink, watercolor, and gouache, 12 x 16
$1,900
This piece explores the relationship between wolves and ravens, who share a remarkable partnership in which ravens use their keen eyesight to locate carcasses and often lead wolves to potential food, while wolves use their strength to open the carcass, providing ravens access to meat they could not reach on their own. In return, ravens may alert wolves to prey or scavenging opportunities and even distract prey, creating a mutually beneficial relationship that has evolved over thousands of years in the wild.
Mom & Me is a painting inspired by an evening drive back home to Gunnison after work at the gallery. Each night, I'd stop at the little fox den just north of town and photograph the kits and their mother until the sun went down. This particular night, I had snapped a few photos and went on my way - thinking from the distance that I watched, that the kit fox was simply standing behind its mother. On further inspection when I got home and opened the images on my computer, I realized the kit was actually giving its mom a hug, arms wrapped playfully around her neck.
Moose encounters are some of my most prevalent wildlife experiences in the wilderness surrounding Crested Butte. These moose studies came from a simple love of drawing, occasionally preferred over painting, and a want to commemorate one of my favorite animals. Last summer alone, I saw 31 different moose - bull, cow, and calf alike. When deeply studied, their shapes - the elegance of the antlers, the awkwardness of their big nose, or the dewlap hanging down under their chin - make them such unique animals, and in that, I find enjoyment.
A Scent on the Wind is a piece inspired by a hike to the top of Augusta Mountain during which I unexpectedly encountered several velvet bucks scavenging for grasses up near treeline. Always hopeful for a (safely distant) mountain lion encounter, my imagination put together a scene of the mule deer peeking over a rock face as he ever so subtly picked up the scent of a lion on the wind.