Snowmass history: The legacy of Flavia Weedn

As part of The Snowmass Villager weekly introduction to local business owners, an article on July 18, 1968, highlighted Flavia Weedn, a local Snowmass artist and shop owner. “Her husband calls her art ‘polished primitive’ but Flavia Weedn, for whom the shop here is named, says her paintings have described in many different ways and she doesn’t really know how to classify them. Flavia has been painting all her life and the childhood scenes and whimsical children that appear in the paintings for which she is becoming known have evolved during the last 10 years. She says, ‘I was always impressed with the charm of kindergarten drawings. My paintings are really scenes of childhood but not done in a childish way.’…Flavia has also written and illustrated three books, two of them for children, The children’s books are fantasies, using the characters from her paintings and the adult book is prose, expressing her feelings about childhood…Two stores in Dallas which feature her paintings are hosting her first one-woman show in October. There is another Flavia shop in the Disneyland Hotel in California, which has been in operation for two years. It is similar to the shop here, she says which features other handmade items besides her paintings. Actually the idea of the shops is based on a European approach, she points out. ‘It is a family-type operation. My brother and his wife do the wood cut-out animals and flowers and my mother makes the Flavia dolls.’ Everything in the shop is handmade and has what she calls ‘the crude professional look.’”