Virginia Unseld left Pennsylvania to visit her brother in 1978 and within one month had sold her things, trained a replacement on her job and moved to the Peak to Peak area, starting out in Russell Gulch. “My paints froze the first winter and were ruined; the cabin had no electricity or running water.” Nevertheless she stayed, working in various service jobs until she moved into teaching, eventually spending 23 years as the art teacher for Clear Creek Schools. Upon her retirement, she set up a studio in Gilpin County and has been active in the arts both as an artist and an arts advocate.

Among the things I learned from sitting down and chatting with Virginia Unseld:

- The Gilpin County Arts Association is in its 74th year, and is the oldest continuously juried art show in Colorado.

- When Virginia was young, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, hosted an annual program for over 1,000 young people to help them learn about and appreciate art. This program continued for many years and launched the career of many artists, including Virginia Unseld’s.

-Taos artist Alyce Frank, a huge inspiration for Virginia Unseld, pioneered a painting technique of covering her canvases with one warm color such as red, and then painting on top of it, letting the color peep out here and there and bring warmth and depth to the entire painting.

Virginia has hung a show at the Nederland Community Library that she is calling: “another darn quARanTine exhibit.” For five pandemic months, Virginia hunkered down in a rented space in the Gilpin Arts Association, and set about working on a series of canvases that were better suited to the large space she was renting, rather than her smaller studio space near the Gilpin Library. Her overall quarantine product: 50 completed paintings from March of 2020 to March of 2021. They were influenced and formed by this decision to use the Gilpin Arts Association space.

One of the choices that the temporary studio space influenced was medium: she had not worked with acrylics for decades, but simple practicality required working with them again: “There simply wasn’t time to allow oil paints to dry.”

The paintings currently hanging in the Nederland Library show are examples of this product, with an emphasis on recognizable local areas, and/or to go with Virginia’s theme of dramatic light, natural patterns and rhythms of life. Since travel was prohibited at the time, the artist worked from her own photographs as a stepping-off point. She creates a sense of place that starts with the photograph and then explores the full depth of the location she is putting on canvas.

“A painting needs to say ‘Come Look at Me,’” Unseld notes. It should be a different experience far away as up close. If asked to categorize her work, she would call it “Contemporary Impressionism.”

Unseld’s work will be available for viewing in the Nederland Community Library through September. Library hours are currently Monday - Thursday 10 a.m. - 7 p.m. and Friday and Saturday 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.

Artist’s Demo of painting with acrylics and Reception will be held at the Nederland Community Library on Thursday, August 12, 2021, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Snacks will be served, and the demonstration will commence at 7 p.m. No need for reservations, just drop in!

For other artists who are interested in mounting shows at the Nederland Community Library, please go to https:// nederland.colibraries.org/art-exhibitinformation/ for more information on how to do so.