Photos by Marie Mccolm During the First Friday Art Reception, the Kosmowski family performed and talked about their art. The Baca Grande Library hosted the First Friday Art Reception on Friday, Nov. 3, featuring the Kosmowski family.

CRESTONE — The Baca Grande Library hosted the First Friday Art Reception on Friday, Nov. 3, featuring the Kosmowski family. About 20 people attended the reception. Light refreshments were served. Noemi Kosmowski and her husband, Chris, were two of the featured artists with several of their paintings hanging on the walls.

The Kosmowski’s are singers as well, and while the crowd drank their choice of water, soda, or wine that was served, the two sang many songs including, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and many other well-known favorites.

Noemi Kosmowski spoke about her art in between the music.

“Thank you all for coming to see all this work that we have done,” she said. “I have many paintings here. My husband Chris of 41 years is also a painter. He has painted many things over the years. He used to only paint sports, and musicians, and now he is painting modern landscapes. He also paints T-shirts. There is a gentleman who came today, and he is wearing Chris’s T-shirt. He paints bigger paintings also and has some on display in Vail, but they are giant paintings. I am a spiritual painter, but I really paint anything. I paint Budha, Jesus, Uganda. You name it I am doing it, dragons, spiritual wolves. I love to paint spiritual things. Thank you all for coming. Please eat, drink, and enjoy.”

Noemi Kosmowski said that she has been painting her entire life. She cannot remember a time when she was not painting.

“The painting it is in my blood. My genes decided this for me. I am from three generations of artists,” she said. “I was painting before I was walking. I was raised in my father’s art studio.  I have been painting all my life. The only time I didn’t paint was when I was a teenager. I said I would never paint or marry an artist and exactly the opposite is what happened to me.”

She said she can remember painting with her kids when they were little.

“It is a tough choice, but I cannot do anything else. I think this was fate. It’s like great performers on stage, it drives me every day. I paint until midnight every night. I go home, I eat, I talk with my family, and I paint,” she said.

Noemi Kosmowski spoke about the paintings hanging at the Baca Grande Library and being a teacher.

“I teach art also. I have classes at my studio in town,” she said. “These are my three pictures here. One of them looks like my students did it, they helped me. The other two I did the work on.”

Kosmowski pointed at three pieces of art. One of them looked like two dragonflies intertwined on a leaf, the painting that her students helped her with. One was a vision of two peacocks standing together, and the third appeared to be a spiritual circle with different splashes of color throughout the circle.

The Kosmowski’s recently opened a small art gallery in town, and they are proud of the gallery.

“We like that our art is displayed there,” she said. “We were made the offer to join other people there. It is a tiny gallery but perfect for our paintings. Everything around you is art. The art is the one thing that is most important to me. There is art in everything. If you look around there is art in paintings, there is art in everything. The coffee mug you drink out of is art. The world is art. If I am not painting, I am thinking about painting and about the art. Painting is my life. It is how I live; it is my fate.”