FAC displays visions of region’s past

Harvey Otis Young’s spectacular “A Mountain Lake” draws you into the gallery. Everything else keeps you there in “Colorado Sublime,” the Fine Arts Center’s exhibition of works from the Katherine and Dusty Loo Collection of Colorado landscapes.

“Colorado Sublime” includes 26 of the 67 Colorado landscapes Katherine Loo recently donated to the center. It’s part of the 200-plus regional landscapes collected by Dusty Loo before his death in 2001.

It’s a major addition to the center’s permanent collection. Not only does it chronologically extend the collection back to the late 19th Century, but it strengthens the collection’s local and regional connection, both in terms of the artists represented and the scenes depicted.

There are scenes of Cheyenne Mountain, Garden of the Gods, and the Colorado Springs of a century ago; there are works by such artists as John Carlson, Robert Reid and Birger Sandzen — major figures in the Fine Arts Center’s predecessor, the Broadmoor Art Academy.

The sense of the sublime changes from the 1860s to the 1940s, the period of these paintings

The earlier paintings stress the landscape’s awe-inspiring but impersonal majesty — what curator Blake Milteer calls “a simultaneous feeling of beauty and terror.” When human figures appear at all, it’s mainly to provide a sense of the immense scale.

As the frontier closed and artists became residents instead of visitors, the meaning of sublime also changed. Artists found it in more intimate spaces and in the transient effects of light.

And the artistic expression becomes more personal, as seen by comparing Charles Craig’s classic nocturnal treatment of Cheyenne Mountain with Leon Kroll’s stylized, almost Cezanne-like approach.

There are other highlights. Reid’s “Sunset, Point Sublime” is an evocative view of the Broadmoor from Cheyenne Canyon by the American Impressionist; Carlson’s “Timberline Austerities” and “Night Mysteries, Garden of the Gods” feature the thick atmosphere typical of the artist’s work.

Less typical is Albert Bierstadt’s almost Impressionistic “Rocky Mountain Range, Colorado.”

And not all artists went for drama. Eve Drewelowe’s “Saplings” has an almost Polynesian look, with the clouds echoing the swaying trees.

With the expanded space for the permanent collection, Milteer hopes to alter exhibits more often than in years past. But this exhibit should be more-or-less unchanged for the remainder of the year.

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“Colorado Sublime,” from the Fine Arts Center’s permanent collection

When: Regular hours 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Sundays; 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays

Where: Fine Arts Center, 30 W. Dale St.

Admission: $7.50 adults, $6.75 seniors, students with ID and youth 5-17; free for members and children 4 and younger; 634-5581 or www.csfineartscenter org