CENTRAL CITY — The Gilpin County Arts Association opened its doors on Sunday, April 19, 2026, to a three-artist show that filled the historic gallery with color, texture, and a steady flow of visitors.

The show featured Amy Love, Cliff Austin, and CD LaForce, each bringing a distinct style shaped by years of work and personal exploration. Conversations moved easily through the space as guests studied the work and spoke directly with the artists.

Amy Love, a native Coloradan who has lived in Evergreen for three decades, stood near her fabric-based landscapes, explaining how her process has evolved.

Amy Love poses with one of her mixed-media fabric landscapes.

Photo by Mindy Leary

“I originally started out with handmade cards,” she said.

Her work now spans larger mixed-media collage pieces, built primarily from fabric and paper. She sources specialty materials online, often choosing textiles that already mimic natural elements.

“I do a lot of outdoor scenes…the water, the sky, the mountains, the textures,” Love said.

Love’s landscapes reflect a lifetime spent in the mountains, rendered in bold color and layered texture, and some materials come from nature itself.

“My nephew lives in Vermont, and they have a lot of birch trees there. And with birch trees, their bark is really kind of thin and falls off. There's all sorts of bark on the ground.  So every couple years, I say, would you send me some bark?” 

Even her smallest details are intentional, from hand-painted paper aspen leaves to three-dimensional animals made with fabric and cotton backing. “It’s a fun process,” she said.

In the upstairs room of the gallery, Cliff Austin’s paintings offered a contrast in medium but a similar devotion to landscape. 

A graduate of the Denver Institute of Technology and the Rocky Mountain School of Art, Austin has been painting since 1980 and is affiliated with several major art organizations.

He has spent most of his adult life painting, working across oils, pastels, and watercolor. 

He teaches classes at the Curtis Center for the Arts in Greenwood Village and leads workshops at the Estes Park Art Center, staying active in both studio work and instruction.

“I seem to paint in cycles,” Austin said. “Pastels for a month or watercolors for a while or oils for a while.”

Though known for landscapes, he said abstract and figurative work can be just as compelling.

“When I teach, it is more about the art than any medium,” Austin said. “It is all so much fun. As it should be.”

His work focuses on the movement of light across form, whether in mountain scenes or urban settings.

“The subject is light and contrast,” Austin writes in his artist statement. “The fascination is in the way light pours, splashes, and wraps around everything we see and contrasts the everyday with the extraordinary.”

Austin’s long career includes both corporate design work and fine art, but his interest in landscapes has remained constant, earning him awards in both pastel and oil at national and local shows.

CD LaForce, visiting from Golden, described the show as a milestone.

CD LaForce stands with his work at the Gilpin Arts show in Central City.

Photo by Mindy Leary

“It’s my first full show in Colorado,” LaForce said. “After two years, I want to see everything actually up.”

He has spent most of his adult life painting, working across oils, pastels, and watercolor. 

He teaches classes at the Curtis Center for the Arts in Greenwood Village and leads workshops at the Estes Park Art Center, staying active in both studio work and instruction.

Many of LaForce’s pieces draw from memory and photographs taken during travels, often in collaboration with his partner who captures stunning images. The work combines personal experience with careful composition, translating real places into stylized scenes with bold colors.

LaForce’s landscapes explore light, color, and moments in nature. Crows are a common subject.

Photo by Mindy Leary

The exhibits will remain on display through May 27.

Preparing for summer

During the event, Gilpin Arts Board President Eric Miller pointed to ongoing efforts to refresh the gallery ahead of the busy season.

“We’ve repainted the whole interior of the gallery,” Miller said. “We’ve repainted the foyer and cleaned up the entryway. And we’re ready for you to come visit and buy art.”

Miller said much of the winter was spent preparing the space, from painting to general cleanup, in anticipation of increased summer traffic.

The organization is also revving up for its largest annual event, the juried show scheduled for June 6.

“We had over 80 artists that submitted work… over 235 pieces of artwork,” he said.

The show, running from 5 to 8 p.m., will include multiple categories, a formal judging process, and $3,500 in prize money. “It’s our biggest event of the year,” Miller said.

As the afternoon wound down, visitors continued to circulate through the gallery, pausing between comments to study the works more closely. For the artists, the goal was simple and shared. “That is the ultimate goal,” one artist said, “To get it out of my studio.”

Guests mingle inside the gallery during the April 19 opening reception.

Photo by Mindy Leary

With fresh paint on the walls and a full season ahead, the gallery is leaning toward that goal: bringing art out of private spaces and into the public eye, one show at a time.

The Gilpin County Arts Association is located at 117 Eureka Street in Central City and is generally open Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., with hours varying slightly by season and events.