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Visiting the upcoming Eagle County art fairs? Let us help you find local artists
The next two weekends hold the Avon Arts Celebration and Beaver Creek Art Festival. If you're planning to attend, go seek out these Eagle County artists
News NEWS | Jul 27, 2023 - By Zoe Goldstien
The next two weekends hold back-to-back fine arts events for Eagle County. This upcoming weekend, July 29 and 30, the Avon Arts Celebration will take place in the Harry A. Nottingham Park. The following weekend, Aug. 4-6, the Beaver Creek Art Festival will alight upon the Beaver Creek Plaza. Both open-air art fairs will feature over 100 fine artists across numerous mediums, whose home locations span the country (and Canada). Both fairs will also present local Eagle County artists, who can be hard to find amongst the crowd without knowing who they are in advance. Keep reading to learn more about local artists who will be at one or both events.
Tara Novak, a painter based out of Eagle, said that her signature series is winter aspens, meant to inspire the same feeling in others that she has when snowboarding through the trees on a powder day.
Tara Novak/Courtesy photo
Tara Novak
- Hometown: Eagle
- Medium: Painting
- Location(s): Avon Arts Celebration
Tara Novak, a painter and former professional snowboarder who has lived in Eagle County since 1994, uses her passion for the outdoors and her professional painting expertise in her art. “Even though my artwork doesn’t necessarily look just like snowboarders flying around the mountain, it’s inspired by the feeling of being in the trees, and being in nature, and the respect for mother nature and the mountains, and all the different manifestations of our environment and how things change, from season to season and with storms and natural occurrences,” Novak said.
Novak works as a painter in two ways; in addition to her fine art, she has run a faux painting business for 25 years, assisting in construction sites by camouflaging and blending walls. “Part of my artwork is that I’ve taken those materials and mediums that I use in the painting business, and I’ve started applying them to canvas, to get different layered effects textures, little pops of metallics, little glitter, glimmers, things like that. And just developing my own style using those mediums that I would normally use in people’s homes on their walls. I have a little different, nontraditional method to my artwork and how I present it,” Novak said.
Novak’s signature series is her winter aspens, taken from her snowboarding experiences—though she now rides for fun, she is also a former professional snowboarder who competed in the 2007 Burton U.S. Open. “One of my favorite places to be, and just have a moment, is up in Beaver Creek, on a beautiful powder day. (Everything is) blue sky, and sparkly, and you go bounding through the powder, through the glades, and stopping for a few minutes, and just taking it in, and how beautiful it is, there’s a serenity and peace that’s there that you can’t find in some other places. That’s the feeling that I hope that people feel when they see my aspens,” Novak said.