Raising up the Community with Art

Submitted

JM Broderick and Kelly Thiel create art of animals at Healing Reins to raise money for the ranch.

When artists decide to join together to raise awareness and money for worthy causes, often the result is maximizing inspiration in a way that can build community. Two Bend artists have worked the last few years to do just this for Healing Reins Therapeutic Riding Center, an equine therapy outreach center doing great work in our community.

Local painters JM Broderick and Kelly Thiel have raised over $6,000 with their portrait paintings of animals at the ranch. Broderick and Theil venture out every year to live sketch the animals—a sort of "sitting" for portraits as it were, but with horses. They then create paintings of the animals that are part of the live auction at the annual Diamonds and Dust fundraiser put on by Healing Reins.

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Another fitting tribute to the nature of raising up our community is the local Instagram account, Rise and Art, started by a group of established female artists to help raise money and awareness for younger female artists. Not only does this great feed help bring young artists to a new audience, but it also showcases the great work of more established female artists, and their processes. The established artists sell their work through Instagram and put a percentage of their sales toward a scholarship that is then awarded to young female artists, as a way to "lift" them and help them become more established.

Not all of the artists who sell their work on the site to raise money for younger artists live in Bend, so you also get to see great work by painters from across the country and dig into a sense of style and aesthetic that we are currently living in. Plus, you get to see women raising up women—and that's just perfect from any perspective you take.