sun Hailey
•
Ketchum
•
Sun Valley
•
Bellevue
•
the weekly
Carey
•
s t a n l e y • F a i r f i e l d • S h o sh o n e • P i c a b o
Curried Game Hens a la Muffy Ritz Page 6
Fate or Chaos Tour Stops in Boise on Thursday Page 9
Kathleen Harrison Talks About the Gift of Life Insurance Page 13
N o v e m b e r 7 , 2 0 1 2 • Vo l . 5 • N o . 4 5 • w w w.T h e W e e k l y S u n . c o m
Watch Out for Random Acts of Kindness BY KAREN BOSSICK
C
ommunity School students are vying to make theirs the kindest school in the nation. The student body is taking part in a national campaign called “15 Days of Kindness” to see who can perform, document and inspire the most random acts of kindness in their community. The program, started in 2008, was inspired by a little boy who opened a door for an elderly woman with a walker while his mother was conducting business in a bank. “He didn’t do it for recognition. He did it, simply, to be kind,” said Think Kindness founder Brian Williams, a motivational speaker from Reno, Nev. “Our goal is to inspire kids across the country to incorporate giving and kindness in their lives,” he added. So far, more than 78,000 students from across the country, including students from schools in Annapolis, Md., and New York City, have taken part, documenting more than 320,000 acts of kindness. Some student’s acts have taken on global significance, said Williams. One middle school student, for instance, decided she wanted to help solve the problem of lack of access to safe drinking water in Kenya. She filmed a YouTube video that went viral, she got a chance to present her spiel on The Today Show, and she traveled to Kenya where straws that filter water are being presented to students. Think Kindness has raised thousands of dollars for charities around the country and collected more than 200,000 shoes for children around the world, among other things. Community School students will be up against students from Carson City, Nev., this time around. They hope to go up against Wood River High School students next semester. The students will hand out a kindness card for every act of kindness they perform. Each card comes with a code that, when entered online, will display each act that has been performed, along with where that card has traveled. Students can log in to check on how the initial act of kindness they performed has a ripple effect. Students have set up a Facebook page and website to document the journey the random acts of kindness take. The program is being sponsored locally by Wild Gift, a local non-profit that provides a mentorship program for young social entrepreneurs who have a plan to creative innovative solutions for challenges facing the world. “We want to see how many acts of kindness our community can inspire and document in November,” said Wild Gift’s Jeff Brendel. “We want to tws start a ripple effect.”
More student news
Don’t miss this week’s Student Spotlight on page 12. Jonathan Kane interviews Community School senior and avid musician, Cameron Jenner, who not only plays guitar, he’s building his own.
Lizzy’s Fresh Coffee Will Be Among the New and Established Businesses Offering Samples, Giveaways and Information at Next Week’s Business Showcase read about it on PaGe 5
A Faux Arts Artist STORY & PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
K
atharine Sheldon deftly lays a sliver of gold leaf onto a painting she’s made of a woman’s head, forming a halo as she does. She takes another sliver and lays it atop the woman’s robe, which she made by mixing an egg yolk with natural pigments. Sheldon is finding that she digs this ancient art form centuries after fresco was the art du jour. “What I like about it is that it’s very organic,” she said. “It’s earth. It’s green. I’m not exposing myself to chemicals like oil paints that are going to make me sick. And I like the look of pigments imprinted into plaster. That’s what made fresco so interesting in the Renaissance.” Sheldon, who lives in Hailey, incorporated fresco into her repertoire last spring when the College of Southern Idaho-affiliated Sawtooth Institute needed someone to demonstrate the egg tempera and fresco techniques used during the 13th and 14th centuries for its Art of Siena symposium. Sheldon was only too happy to include it into her quiver of tools for her Creative Paint Finishes business, which couples Old World techniques with modern materials and technology. A modern-day Renaissance artist, Sheldon creates custom surface treatments for walls and ceilings. She does trompe l’oeil, an art technique by which she fools the eye into thinking a painting is an actual flower vase in an alcove or a window opening onto a French garden. She’s done murals turning children’s walls into aquariums. She’s imprinted leaves into the surfaces of walk-in closets. She’s made wooden bookshelves look like marble and painted what resembles fabrics on walls and mosaics and floor canvases on cement floors. She’s endowed countertops with crackled and aged finishes and applied decoupage to walls. And she’s treated ceilings so that they look as if you’re looking into the sky. Dixie Grant, who has a condo in Ketchum and a home in Boise which she uses for fundraisers and other large gatherings, says there are not enough adjectives in the world to describe Sheldon’s work: “She transformed my house and condo with wall finishes, and amazing finishes.” Sheldon transformed Grant’s institutional-looking condo with its white wall and white ceiling by putting a relief and bamboo on the wall. She “marbleized” a wooden cabinet that had delaminated. She painted wood grain on sheetrock. And she added texture via raised surfaces with plastic to which she stenciled in
Frescoes are one of many of the creative finishes Katharine Sheldon can offer her clients.
artistic details. “She’s always learning new techniques—she put a combination of shredded cotton and silk mixed with gold mica and specks of silver on my 12-foot ceiling. Not only does it twinkle at night but it dampens the noise you get when you get a crowd in the house,” said Grant. “She also made my soapstone countertops, which I couldn’t stand, look like granite. I love to take people in and pull back the shower curtain to show them old contrasted with the new. Everybody is like, ‘Wow!’ ” Sheldon, who studied art at Bethel College and the University of Minnesota, moved to Ketchum from Portland, Ore., to pursue art with the Sun Valley Center for the Arts.
She was taking advantage of a lull in her landscaping business one winter when she began her exercise in creativity. She bought a book on faux finishes and decided she wanted to try each project the book talked about. “Now I go wherever my mind can take me,” she said. “This has been an amazing journey that has taken me from being a house painter to a creator able to use my art background. I love the fact that creative options seem endless. Every time I turn around I get led down a different road. I’m not just an oil painter. I’m not just an acrylic painter. I’m a creator.” A construction worker who saw a wood-
continued, page 12