Family Trails: From Sagebrush to Paintbrush, featuring the artwork of Rudl & Audrie Mergelman

 The work of father and daughter artists, Rudl & Audrie Mergelman, will be featured in this special show opening June 7th from 4-7pm at the Tracy Miller Gallery in Manitou Springs. Both artists will be present for collectors to meet and speak with. The story of Rudl's art can be found in his hometown of Gunnsion, Co. He spent his teenage years haying fields, branding calves and falling in love with the quickly disappearing cowboy way of life. It was at college though, that Rudl found a singleness of purpose:art. Wildlife, cowboy life, sprawling landscapes-these became the sugjects of his paintings and sculptures. His vast body of work straddles the fence between realism and romanticism-a bit fanciful but always familiar. In her early years, Audrie found her true love, horses. Art came a close second. Conspicuously absent from her early body of work, however, were many subjects overtly western, suggesting an impulse to distiguish her work from that of her father. As she finished her master's degree in art at Adam's State College, the vast beauty of the San Luis valley confronted her with an inescapable reality:painting the western experience was simply in her blood.  She exhibits her father's heightened sense of color, but with far more exuberance and far less restraint. It often seems that objects in her paintings are reflecting more color than is present in the visible spectrum, accurate only in relationship to each other, as well as to emotional intensity of the piece.