Boulder’s Twenty Ninth Street hosts fine art festival – Boulder Dail…

Painters, photographers, metalsmiths, jewelry makers and a variety of other artists gathered Sunday for the final day of the third annual Howard Alan Fine Art Street Festival.

The festival was at the Twenty Ninth Street shopping center Saturday and Sunday.

Sarah Cole, owner of Sacred Seed Designs, describes her jewelry as geometrical, celestial and ethereal. She wants people to put on her jewelry and feel confident and uplifted. Cole, a metalsmith, makes all her own jewelry by hand, and she is best known for her angel wing earrings. Cole spoke of her creations with love and passion, and noted that she does her best to channel positive energy into her creations, so the wearer can walk around with positive energy.

“I want to create a story, something unique that everyone loves but also something special that is not seen everywhere,” Cole said.

Cole recalled that she used to look through magazines for jewelry catalogs to admire the work. She said it only made sense that she used that same love to start creating her own jewelry. Cole said she loves to accessorize, elevate her style and adorn herself. It makes her feel beautiful and confident, and she wanted to share that feeling with others.

“I want women to feel that divine, goddess energy,” Cole said.

Aurora based oil painter Monica Marquez Garica combines both abstract acrylic pour techniques with detail-oriented realism paintings. She said she has been painting full time since 2016, but developed the mixed technique of abstract and realism in 2019.

Marquez Garcia starts off her paintings by taping off the areas of the canvas she wants to keep clean, then pours acrylic paints right onto the canvas, manipulating the paints by moving the canvas and adding light and dark colors for shading. She then uses the abstract pours as the base, often using the pours to convey liquids or fluid movements.

“I love it, it shows so much movement. And acrylic dries so much faster than oil,” Marquez Garcia said in Spanish.

Then she moves on to the detailed work of realism and takes her time to work with oil paints. She noted she uses motifs of movement when using her mixed abstract and realism technique, depicting wine in bottles and glasses or betta fish swimming in water.

Magenta Reynolds creates all her own work for her business, Leather Sage, from hunting elk and deer in Montana to the beaded work that adorns her work. She said her work is a mix of challenging and meditative. The loom weave bead work forces her to slow down, so she said she finds the work calming. She said hunting the animal is a humbling and challenging experience.

“It’s humbling to hunt, to just be a little human out in the world,” Reynolds said.

Reynolds noted oftentimes hunters will ignore the animal hide, as it cannot be eaten. So the hide gets left behind to decompose. She said if she is going to take from the world by hunting, she wants to give back. She hunts in the Montana wilderness once a year, and then processes the hides to create the leather. With the leather she creates belts, jewelry and adornments for hats. She said she is conscious and intentional with all of her art.