The Lincoln Center Art Gallery will exhibit Shades of Spring, through June 3. This exhibit features the work of local artists who find inspiration in the transformation of our landscape at springtime.

Fort Collins muralists—Chelsea Ermer, Diane Findley, Joe Motive, Shawna Turner, Kristen Vohs—will be live painting inside the gallery to create their expressions of spring for the exhibit. Visitors can watch as 5-by-8-foot canvases come to life through May 13.

A selection of artworks by members of Plein Air Artists of Colorado will be featured in the lobby gallery. En plein air is the French expression for “in the open air.” Plein air painters leave their studios behind and experience painting and drawing in the landscape. This desire to be in nature creates the ideal opportunity to capture the unique characteristics of the season.

As part of Downtown Fort Collins Art Week, April 29 - May 7, the Art Gallery will have special open hours Saturday, April 29 and May 6, 12-6 p.m., and Plein Air Artists Colorado will be painting out in Old Town Square starting at 9:00 am on Friday, May 5.

The Lincoln Center Art Gallery is free and open to the public Wednesdays and Fridays, 12–6 p.m. and prior to most performances

Featured Artists:

Chelsea Ermer is an artist, illustrator and teacher from Fort Collins, Colorado. Her murals can be found on several transformer cabinets and Pianos About Town pianos throughout town. She is particularly interested in creating art about flowers and nature, fantasy, and mythology.

A 1976 graduate of Colorado State University, Diane Findley is a long-standing presence in the Fort Collins art community. A prolific potter and painter, she maintains Findley Pottery & Fine Art in Fort Collins. Diane takes great pride in currently serving as president of Trimble Court Artisans cooperative, which she has been a member for more than 45 years. It is the oldest retail arts and crafts cooperative in the United States.

Joe Motive is a self-taught artist originally from Santa Cruz, California. He specializes in traditional, digital, and virtual reality art. Joe enjoys painting on a multitude of surfaces and sizes. Joe’s style varies but is usually very colorful and vibrant. Most of his work is originally inspired from the surf and skate culture of Santa Cruz.

Shawna Turner is a multi-passionate fine artist, photographer, and graphic designer residing in Fort Collins. Her favorite subjects to paint are nature and animals, as well as intuitive abstracts. She’s forever a painter though her most recent showing of work includes assemblages with found objects, such as rusty metal, rocks, shells, or bones. She feels her soul was made to create and it’s in creating that she thrives.

Painting has been Kristen Vohs’ passion for the last 20 years. She attended the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, before moving to Fort Collins in 2006 to continue her education at Colorado State University. She loves the process of making art and leans heavily on her intuition while painting. Kristen’s goal is to express an emotional meaning by using color and form, rather than to create a photorealistic depiction of the subject matter.

Plein Air Artists Colorado (PAAC) was created for the love of plein air painting and to enjoy the camaraderie of painting outdoors. A founding principal is that PAAC creates opportunities for artists to paint outdoors together and that these paint outs be open to everyone of every level. The roots of PAAC go back many years (to the early 1990s) to the Art Students’ League of Denver when several landscape students started painting “En Plein Air” on a regular basis.