Marty Walsh, artist and owner of Trifecta Gallery

By Kristen Peterson

Monday, March 9, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Name: Marty Walsh, artist and owner of Trifecta Gallery

Age: 51

Education: Art Academy of Cincinnati, where she majored in painting and minored in sculpture

Gallery: Trifecta is a 250-square-foot gallery in the Arts Factory (107 E. Charleston Blvd.) that features contemporary figurative art by local and national artists: “I like to have a cross fertilization of ideas, concepts and interests so that people living in Las Vegas can see what’s happening outside of Las Vegas and people living in other cities can see what Las Vegas is doing.”

Artists exhibited: For the most part, Walsh features emerging artists who are skilled painters and illustrators and likely will have long careers. The works are often narrative, sophisticated and humorous. Shows are changed every month. Artists in solo and group shows have included Mary Warner, Casey Weldon, Thomas Lee Bakofsky, Kathie Olivas, Amy Sol and the late illustrator Jack Endewelt.

Themes in her own artwork: Walsh has created several food-related paintings and portraits of vintage appliances with each appliance representing a member of her family. Nostalgia is a big part of her work.

The aesthetic experience: “I’ve been painting seriously since I was 10,” Walsh says with a laugh. Born in Detroit, she moved with her family to Kentucky at age 13 and was winning state fair awards, making posters for local organizations and painting commissioned works for friends of her father.

Food has played a role in her work. Walsh says she tastes and hears color and refers to TV dinners as her first lesson in composition and color distribution: “the quintessential training ground for a long career in art.”

After college she worked as a pastry chef for a Viennese catering company making “these beautiful torts. It was the most sensory job you could ever want. Because all of my senses were at work it made me a better painter.”

Road to Vegas: After working as an apprentice pastry chef, Walsh moved to Martha’s Vineyard with a friend to open a deli — a business she stayed with for six years before marrying Pete. They bought a Volkswagen bus and drove 20,000 miles across the United States on side roads. They hit all corners of the country, breaking briefly in Georgia where they lived in a treehouse and managed a youth hostel while waiting out the winter.

They moved to Ireland (where Pete is from), settled 20 miles west of Dublin, and Walsh went to work constructing a garden along a river where they bought property and built a house.

Walsh planted thousands of perennials — tulips and daffodils and anything to create a great color combination in her 150-foot-by-5-foot garden. “They broke all the rules of horticulture, but they put together the most amazing colors and textures,” she said of artists gardening in Ireland.

After nine years in Ireland, they moved to Las Vegas for dry weather and a booming economy.

Walsh took a job as a food stylist, had a show at the Small Works Gallery, then got involved with the Contemporary Arts Center, serving on its board, before opening Trifecta Gallery in 2004.

On the arts in Vegas: “As with many things Las Vegas, our dynamics for starting and thriving a business are unique. The players have to be open-minded, willing, flexible and passionate. Passion is the thrust that keeps us going during the embryonic years, which I believe we are still in.

“One day soon there will be an arts voice that says Las Vegas, but not in a casino ‘ding-ding-ding’ way. It will be ours, I feel it, others are curating it, many are hoping for it. I have faith and hope things are moving forward even though there are obvious signs contrariwise.”

Other interests: Watching PBR (professional bull riding). “I’m embarrassed of that because people here think it’s so redneck.”

Sticking around? “We have no plans to leave. Las Vegas has been good to us. What brought us here has kept us here.”