The Steamboat Pilot & Today

The inspiration for Tinker Tiffany's silk painting, "It Was a 5 Grouse Day," came from a particularly bird-sighting-heavy day of skiing with friends. (Courtesy/Tim Murphy and Tinker Tiffany)

Tinker Tiffany is a perpetual optimist.

In December 1989, she broke her arm skiing nine days after she moved to Steamboat Springs. It wasn’t so bad, she said, because the bone in her upper arm did not completely snap.

About a year before that, Tiffany took her first art class. She went home that night and decided to be a professional artist. Twenty years later, she’s still at it, painting intricate natural designs on pieces of silk.

“These are things I have definitely seen and experienced, and I try to bring all that in,” Tiffany said. “I definitely try and take what I’ve seen and experienced and translate it into my paintings.”

That includes images of the hairless fox that hangs around her backyard, of grouse that leaped at her on the mountain or of evening alpenglow. The images are filled with bright hues and sharp contrasts, lots of blues and yellows with clear white lines where the wax she traces shapes with has washed away.

“I am a happy, upbeat person, and I think my love of color is almost — I don’t want to say childlike. I just love simple things. It doesn’t have to be dark and gloomy. I love effervescence,” she said. “I try to treat my subject matter with a playfulness. And with the swirl of the paint — that, to me, is very magical.”

The thought of showing her work makes Tiffany happy — she smiles and gets wistful about the idea of people having a positive reaction to her art. It’s the same way she lights up about how the silk glows and makes tints swirl, and about why she likes to go back and forth from watercolors to hand-decorated purses.

In her home studio, Tiffany has lined the walls with beloved watercolor paintings she doesn’t want to let go. Stacks of custom-made frames fill the space next to her work table, each one used to stretch a piece of silk before Tiffany applies tint to fill in a wax-drawn flower design.

Most of her scenes have some connection to a mountain, desert or tropical landscape — influences Tiffany chalks up to loving the Rockies, watching a lot of John Wayne movies as a child and playing outside in Florida growing up.

“Growing up in that time, when you did things, and you did craft things and you got thrown outside for the day, I think that’s where I get my love of nature,” she said.

Next month, Tiffany will take off on a summer craft fair circuit to sell her silk works, in the form of scarves, handbags and full-size paintings. Her schedule isn’t set, as she waits to find out whether she’s been accepted to juried shows across the West. Artists aren’t guaranteed a spot in those shows, she said, because judges and their tastes change from year to year.

Tiffany treats those chances — and possible disappointments — with the same buoyancy infused in all her work.

“As an artist, you go through a lot of rejection situations — but doesn’t everybody? And if you’re doing what you love, that’s more than half the game.”