Local artist brings the secret life of Aspen to New York’s Nancy Hoffman Gallery

Artist Jody Guralnick began a lifelong fascination and commitment to nature and scientific studies — as well as a love of hiking the mountains that surround us — when she moved from New York City to Aspen in the mid-1980s.

The fruit of that labor will be on display in her first show entitled, “Tell Me a Secret” at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York, from Feb. 1 through March 16. This will be her first time showing with Nancy Hoffman and the show will include approximately 15 works, made between 2022 and the present. Works in the exhibition range from 12 x 12 inches up to 60 x 144 inches.

The paintings depict the winding patterns that lichen forms on rocks, as well as the branching hyphal patterns of fungal growth. The lichen, painted in acrylic in rich and alluring impasto, stands in bas-relief against an oil background evocative of nature’s palette.

“Living in Aspen has had a huge effect on my work, and it took me many years to realize how big an effect,” said Guralnick. “Several years ago, I started volunteering with the Forest Conservancy because I love to hike. The reason I started volunteering was extremely selfish just because I was teaching myself botany. A friend of mine told me the classes were free if you were a volunteer. From there I became a Master Naturalist specializing in lichen.”

Guarlnick acknowledged that those early classes taught her how to and got her in the habit of using a magnifying loupe while hiking through the region, and allowed her to see things at a microscopic level and see the small things that most of us don’t notice unless we take the time.

“As muses go, yeast, mold, mushrooms, and lichen have a lot to offer,” she said. “When fungus grows, it casts these lacy mycelial threads. It’s so baroque and over the top.”

She said that the microscopic universes she discovered within lichen that forms on rocks as well as the branching hyphal patterns of fungal growth invited close examination and became fodder for dissection and categorizing. “The ephemeral nature of nature itself, its cycle of growth, deterioration, and rebirth became a metaphor for life and its fragility” that made its way back into her work.

“I called the show ‘Tell me a secret’ because when I am walking in the woods, no matter what mood I’m in, I feel better and I feel like I’m surrounded and that I can’t be lonely,” she said. “The more you look, the more you see. There’s this language, this way of communicating with plants and mushrooms that most of us are moving too fast to notice.”

When describing her work she notes that though she is a Master Naturalist and takes lots of photos of the life she sees when walking through the Rockies, she is not a botanical illustrator. Instead, she aims to channel the overall feelings she gets while in nature.

“I’m not that interested in the literal translation of any of it,” she said. “I am always trying to paint the way it feels to me. And then if people talk to me about my work, I can talk to them about having a sense of stewardship for the environment, too. So it gives me a sort of double purpose, doing this work.”

The artist further articulated that she wants viewers of her work to understand the partnership humans share with the natural world and recognize the responsibility to take care of it.

“We’re in this waltz with these creatures, and we don’t pay attention to our detriment,” she said. “First of all, I want viewers to just see my paintings as paintings. But there is also this inherent message in the paintings that we can be the guardians of all this. So for me, there’s always that climate change message in there too and I hope that we all get the message to pay attention.”

Sarah Girgis is the Publisher for The Aspen Times. She can be reached at 970-429-9151 or sgirgis@aspentimes.com.