Painting Archives - CSPM
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  • Hours: Tues. - Sat., 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.
  • Free Admission
  • Building: 215 S. Tejon St.

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Artwork Medium: Painting

“Cloudscape with Mountain”, Mary Ann Bransby

Cloudscape with Mountain, Mary Ann Bransby, Mixed Media

Artist Biography

Mary Ann was described as a precocious child and teenager excelling in most everything she tried including art, crafts, music and sports. As a teen she received a scholarship to the Kansas City Art Institute, where she studied silversmithing and mastered the art of watercolor painting under the tutoring of Thomas Hart Benton.

Just two weeks before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Mary Ann married Eric Bransby. During the war, while Eric was in the army, Mary Ann designed parts and the die forms for B-52 long range bombers.

When the war ended, Mary Ann and family (including new daughter, Fredericka) moved to Colorado Springs so Mary Ann could study at the Broadmoor Academy at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, under the direction of Boardman Robinson.

In that same year, 1946, the family of three moved to Yale University where Mary Ann began the study of ceramics while Eric taught there.

In 1953 the family returned to the high altitude of Colorado Springs in the hope that Fredericka’s asthma might be relieved. The change worked as Mary Ann and good friend, Ava Heinrichsdorff started a horsemanship program for children, in which Fredericka thrived.

In 1965 Mary Ann, following Eric’s joining the faculty at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, completed her Bachelors and Masters degrees in Fine Arts. She then taught at UMKC at the graduate level. She initiated a program which involved the three university departments of Art, Music and Dance called “Choreographing the Object”. This performance, done a number of times throughout the midwest, was so popular that it was aired on the television program, Good Morning America.

In retirement, Mary Ann and Eric came “home” to Colorado Springs, continuing her love of metalwork and watercolor. While enjoying her own art production, she organized two groups, the Pikes Peak Watercolor Society and the Chromatic Edge.

Following Mary Ann’s death in 2011, Eric Bransby borrowed from author Lillian McCue’s words when her husband passed away: “Of all the manifold gifts that I gave you, the last, and best, is this: to outlive you to take on myself in bereavement to live. Farewell, beloved. Accept what I give.”

“Rudari”, Betty Ross

Rudari, Betty Ross, Acrylic on Canvas

Artist Biography

A prolific artist, Elizabeth (Betty) Ross mastered several media—watercolor, acrylic, oil, pencil, ink, wood, and fabric. With these, she produced landscapes, portraits, still lifes, collage, and a range of non-representational work over a 50-year career.

Born in Romania to American expat parents, Ross left as a child but seemed always touched by her origin country, especially the Gypsy life there that left her with a sense of roaming and of reaching for the exotic and ephemeral, especially in Gypsy dress, which she found penurious but provocative.

Applying vivid colors in bold gestural movements, Ross created arresting pieces that spoke of the moment. Her modus with landscapes, however, was first to record a scene or subject with a drawing or watercolor, later reconstructing and enlarging the captured image in her studio with acrylic on canvas or paper. This two-stage effort worked especially well for landscape paintings of Ireland and America’s Zion Park, arguably her most successful and engaging work.

The Irish countryside engaged her eye during her travels there: green fields bordered by hedgerows and stone walls, sheep and cattle grazing everywhere. She felt it was a serene scene but noted the area was “poor, bare bones.” And she was aware, traveling in the late twentieth century, of the country’s violent political struggles, the “Troubles.” She described the scene as “peaceful but at war with itself.” In the resulting painting, we see only the peaceful.

Ross earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Art from Radcliffe and a Master’s Degree in Theatre at the University of California Berkeley. In 1975, she and her husband, Murray, moved to Colorado Springs and founded TheatreWorks at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. Betty was chief costume designer for the troupe.

Ross exhibited in numerous Colorado shows and in Taos, New Mexico, New York, and Chicago. A National Endowment for the Arts grant in the 1990’s enabled her to travel to her Romanian birthplace, a journey that renewed her family’s early association with Gypsy culture. She cited the artists de Kooning, Matisse and Motherwell as major influences on her own work.

Her first husband, Robin Magowan, was heir to the Safeway grocery chain. They had two sons, James and Felix. A third son, Orion, was a child of her marriage to Murray Ross.

In 2017, the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs mounted a major show of Ross’s work, which included an illustrated catalog of her work and career: Betty Ross: Democratic Vistas. Joanna Roche, Professor of Art History at the University of California, provided an essay critiquing Ross’s work.

“Untitled”, Zola Zaugg

Untitled, Zola Zaugg, Oil on Linen on Board

Artist Biography 

Zola Zaugg was born in 1890 in Mexico Missouri. She had, from an early age, an interest in art, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Hardin College Conservatory.

In 1916 she married Frederick Zaugg, a dentist, and they moved to Colorado Springs shortly thereafter. They were accepted into the society of Colorado Springs in which the arts were admired.

The Colorado Springs Art Guild was born in the 1940s and Zola joined the local art scene as it grew and developed, showing her art for the first time at the Hacienda room at the Antlers Hotel. She told Gazette art critic Tom Reaney that after hanging her paintings, she went home depressed. His observation of this was that “she showed a humility and honesty that will push her to greater accomplishments”. Her landscapes “seem to be handled with a freedom and sureness but leave enough to be wondered about, and create a desire to look again and see something new.” At a later one-person show at the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, Zola expressed her inner belief about her art by quoting a favorite line of Walt Whitman: “to sing what belongs to you and none else.” She was best known for portraits, landscapes and familiar scenes of local landmarks including much painted Pikes Peak, Cheyenne Mountain and the Garden of the Gods.

With the growth of the abstract in art, she made her feelings known by asserting that the artist should maintain “some semblance to known objects that a connection of some thought may be established between observer and artist.”

As her reputation grew she exhibited her art beyond Colorado Springs in Denver as well as in her hometown of Mexico, Missouri. Zola Zaugg passed away in 1983.