Steamboat Pilot & Today

It took all her will power, but Zanobia forced herself to take time off skiing to make more paintings.

"It was hard to do," she said. "But when the universe creates a vacuum, we always fill it." Almost a year ago, the hair stylist and artist opened a three-room gallery next door to her hair salon, and now the empty walls act as a kind of taskmaster, always calling for new work.

For tonight's show, Zanobia will premiere a new large landscape painting, several antique flower paintings and several nudes.

The landscape painting titled, "You're Invited to my Aspen Forest," took her years to paint but hours to complete.

"One of the things that artists do is to make small paintings on location for bigger paintings they finish in the studio," she said. "If you try to paint from a photograph, it's just not the same. A painting reminds you of how you saw it."

Zanobia did the original painting of an aspen grove on Buffalo Pass years ago.

"I wanted to paint it, but you need to get the time," she said.

She took her evenings and some of the time she usually devoted to skiing to complete a series of flower paintings, a reccurring image in her work since she picked up a brush.

"I've loved flowers since I was a child," she said. "I've grown African violets, and paint them in a lot of my watercolor work."

Like her landscapes, Zanobia paints flowers from life and not from photographs.

"My goal is to bring more beauty into the environment and share that with people," she said. "And I hope people will acquire these (paintings) for their environment."

-- To reach Autumn Phillips call 871-4210

or e-mail aphillips@steamboatpilot.com