The Four Directions

The Four Directions is a show of work by four of the artists of The Sportsmans Gallery / Paderewski Fine Art in its Beaver Creek, Colorado location.  The show opens December 19th, 2022, and features Laura W. Adams as the artist representing the Eastern United States.  

Please see Laura's artist's statement for the show:

I have lived in the Southern / Eastern U.S. most of my life, and have become partial to the flora and fauna of my favorite haunts - from the green, misty mountains of the Nantahala rain forest to the soft and humid climes of the low country.  But when I travel out west, I am wholly captivated by the colors and by the unfamiliar.  

The ever-declining presence of the showy Gunnison Sage Grouse I find fascinating.  This bird spends most of its year hunkered behind its scrappy namesake bushes, only to emerge in early spring in one of the most amazingly brazen courtship displays our country has to offer. The dance, the feather spikes, the puffing, and the competition - it is all so big, strange, and beautiful. 

There is also the more sublime, such as the Horned Lark, unless you look more closely.  This small, brown, sparrow-like bird is our only native Lark species. If you get up close to it, you can see the lovely yellow washes, the intriguing mask, and the quirky feather tufts on top of the male’s head, which give it his name. It defends the nests made in the dirt of a field, the more degraded the field the better, by shooting up hundreds of yards in the air, only to spiral downward while making angry twitters.  Then there is the dive bomb towards the nest at the end. Quite the defense strategy.

The small group of works for this show help tell the story of my experience when visiting the West, primarily from a "bird’s eye" view.  I hope you enjoy!

Laura Adams