DENVER — This weekend marks the start of Colorado Art Weekend, a collection of art shows happening across several weekends through Labor Day weekend.
First up is the 9th annual Park Hill Art Festival, which showcases 90 professional artists from throughout the Rocky Mountain region.
“We specialize in face-mounted acrylics,” said photographer Randy Koepsell. “We use a pearl metallic print medium.”
Koepsell's photos look almost like paintings, and the cost is a fraction of what you might pay in a gallery.
His work and the work of other artists, craftsmen and clothiers will be on display and for sale at this weekend's Park Hill Art Festival.
“I’ll be working live, so I'll be demonstrating some art pieces that I’ll be working on," said Judith Dickinson, a commissioned portrait artist who has even painted the governor. “And then I do Western paintings and then my husband and I work in Africa, so I paint the Africans, also."
The festival will also feature clothing and other goods.
"We do everything recycled, and we make it here in Colorado,” said Autumn Teneyl.
Her clothing line is one-of-a-kind.
“I go to Los Angeles and I dig through [trash],” Teneyl said. “This is where large manufacturers dump huge amounts of fabric from over production. And then we bring it back to Colorado, and we cut and sew here."
The festival, now almost a decade old, will be here this Saturday and Sunday, with a little something for everyone.
“I do things that are athletic and that you can wear out and that you can travel in," Teneyl said. “I feel like it's a woman who's ready for some change in her life, and she could be 15 or she could be 80 – and that's real."
"This one's from the Tetons,” Koepsell said of another photo. “It's an alpenglow sky that's known as the Belt of Venus. It's pre-visual light. It's very rare, I've only seen it two times."
“We just had a great year last year, so we decided to come back," Dickinson said.
The show will once again be presented on the grounds of the Park Hill Masonic Lodge on Montview Boulevard between Dahlia and Eudora streets.
It runs Saturday, June 4 and Sunday, June 5 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Next up in the art series is the Evergreen Mountain Art Celebration, happening June 25 and June 26.