SARANAC LAKE – Lately, it seems like every day brings a new miracle for artist Cris Winters.

“My life is full of miracles right now,” she told the Enterprise Wednesday. “Ever since I found this house and decided what I wanted to do – it’s like, ‘Oh, I really want this so and so thing to happen,’ and the next day, it bonks me on the head, just, ‘Here it is – take it,’ which is a really amazing thing.

“My head is exploding, actually, from all the things I can do here.”

Her house at 25 Woodruff St., a few doors down from NorthWind Fine Arts gallery, where she used to be a member, is unique for a number of reasons. For one thing, it’s pink, which surely inspired Winters to name the gallery and studio she’s operating out of the house “Art at the Pink House.” For another, its front yard contains a large garden of bright, yellow sunflowers, which nearly obscure the pink house they adorn.

“It is so much fun having this garden,” Winters said. “Bunches of people go by, and they always go, ‘Whoa.'”

Things have been moving quickly for Winters since she decided to open a gallery and a studio in Saranac Lake. For years, she had been eyeing the house, thinking it would be the perfect place for such a venture.

“I’d bring my artist friends down here … and I’d drag them down the street and say, ‘Look at this cute house – don’t you want to buy this and start an art gallery here?'” she said. “I was just kind of joking around, but I thought, ‘This would be so perfect.'”

Winters has loved art since she was a child, when she first became interested in fabric and its endless possibilities. Before becoming a full-time artist, she worked as a biologist specializing in conservation biology. Her love of birds and botany can be seen in her art, which often combines the abstract, the representational, and the functional. After exhibiting her work in Saranac Lake for years, she decided to open her own gallery here in the pink house.

“I bought it in May, I moved in the end of June and I opened the gallery at the end of July,” she said. “I feel really lucky. Things are moving.”

Winters, who prefers to work on fabric collages these days, but who has also explored several other media, said she hopes the gallery’s content will make it stand out from the other galleries in the area.

“I have a lot of interesting artist friends who are fiber artists and mixed media artists, and there is not very much of that kind of art in Saranac Lake,” she said. “That’s what I’m going to specialize in – fiber and mixed media art.”

Winters said the decision to open the gallery came naturally.

“It was kind of a by-product of wanting to combine my home and my studio,” she said. “I really liked the idea of being able to get up in the morning, take my coffee and go down and get to work. The fact that I found a place where people can walk in the door and that fact that there is this room which makes a perfect gallery is really why I did it.”

Almost on cue, a couple from Montreal walked in the door to take a look around. Winters proved to be a friendly, convivial host, offering them a map of the area’s art galleries and even trying to direct them to the neighboring NWFA before the couple returned to the street.

“I owned a gallery previously, (in Valatie),” she said. ” It really was a nice experience. I had a lot of fun doing it – I met a lot of terrific people.

“One thing I found then, and I’m finding the same thing here, is people come in, they look around, and go, ‘Wow – I’d really like to learn how to do that – do you teach art classes?’ It’s a great sort of combination, I think, of having my own workspace I can share with people for teaching classes and then have the gallery here as well.”

Winters plans to offer a variety of art classes and workshops, including fabric collage, mixed media collage, fabric dying, printing on fabric and nature drawing.

“BluSeed teaches some classes, but there really aren’t other places in this town where it’s easy to teach art classes,” she said. “That’s going to be kind of a special, unique thing and one reason I really wanted to have this space.

“BluSeed has good space for pottery, for printmaking, for a few other things, and this is the place to do fiber work and to do journal work and to do other kinds of stuff.”

This Friday marks the opening reception of “Reflections and Exchanges,” the gallery’s debut First Friday exhibition. The reception will run from 5 to 8 p.m.

“This show is going to be new work of mine including … some fabric work I’m doing with my friend, Lynne Taylor,” she said. “She prints and dyes fabrics. … I make printed fabrics myself with fabric dye and silk screens and other kinds of funky stuff, and we exchanged little groups of fabric.

“She is doing her artwork on my fabric and I am doing my artwork on her fabric, and we’ll show them all together as sort of a group.”

On Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Taylor will offer a workshop called, “Painting on Silk.” Winters said the workshop fee is $75, plus an as-yet-to-be-determined materials fee, and, as of Wednesday, two spots remained open for the workshop.

Winters said she hopes to bring in pieces that appeal to both art aficionados and those who may be unfamiliar with the art world.

“I want people to feel like art is accessible to everybody,” she said. “I want people to think art can be a part of their everyday lives. It doesn’t have to be a special occasion to have art in your home.

“A lot of these pieces here are very affordable. I always want to have something here that is very affordable, so if somebody really loves what they see, they can take it home with them.”

For more information on Art at the Pink House, contact Winters at 518-524-0533, PinkHouseGallery@gmail.com or visit its Facebook page.