Bohemian artists sporting berets and goatees flog canvases to create abstract splots in rented downtown lofts. A black-clad performance artist wraps a tree in aluminium foil and charges thousands of dollars for the masterpiece. Smug museum patrons in tuxedos nibble on caviar, dropping names and writing checks as they pass by ubiquitous oil paintings.
Mention fine art and for many it brings to mind that flood of clichés. The worlds of painting, sculpture, printmaking and silversmithing are the hoity-toity pursuits of an urban, privileged culture available only to those in a certain tax bracket.
Not.
Lindsey Housel, manager of digital engagement programs at the Denver Art Museum, spends a good chunk of her workday battling those misperceptions.
“That’s something we think about a lot,” Housel said. “You don’t have to have an art history degree to come to the museum … It is an expression of the common person, of the way someone sees the world. It’s very personal.”
Aurora is living proof of that notion. Some of the region’s most prominent and successful artists live right here. They have to juggle their latest creations with picking up the kids after school and figuring out what’s for dinner, just like everyone else. These artists and others strive to create and help others understand that art is everyone’s pursuit. They interpret their worlds in the galleries in the developing Arts District along East Colfax Avenue, in storefronts and rented studios on Havana Street, and in garages, basements and living rooms like yours. Their creations are here and all over the world.
You don’t have to own a tuxedo to be moved by their work. All it takes is a little time to experience it.
Painterly Passion: Theresa Anderson
Theresa Anderson creates her comfort zone with canvas and paint. “I’m really a messy person,” Anderson said. “I want to see evidence of the mark. Some of the marks that I make, the process to make them is messy. It’s drippy. You can see that on my floor,” she added with laughter, pointing to blotches of color on the concrete of her garage in southeast Aurora.
For Anderson, who moved to Aurora with her family from Minnesota 11 years ago, that messiness hints at freedom and expression. A former restaurant manager who received her bachelor’s of fine arts degree in painting from the University of Colorado Denver in 2007, Anderson has experimented with explosions of color and free use of line to find her voice.
And she’s done it from her suburban home. Her trip to her studio is a walk from the living room to the garage.
She built her life as an artist as her kids attended Smoky Hill High School and her husband worked at the Anschutz Medical Campus in north Aurora. That double existence has made a mark on her work in different ways. Landscapes that Anderson painted showing scenes of suburban Saint Paul, Minn., could easily double as portraits of Aurora neighborhoods from decades back.
“It’s almost as if you live in two worlds. I’m living in the suburbs and there’s an idea about someone who’s a mother of kids that play baseball,” Anderson said. “I would leave my house and go to my studio, and it was almost like another world … Now since my studio is in the house and I don’t have to travel, the landscape doesn’t have the same impact on me.
“I think my work has gotten a little more inward,” she added.
She’s dabbled in clay and she’s still experimenting with sculpture, but Anderson is at home when she picks up a brush. Painting has been Anderson’s main creative focus since she set out to be a professional artist nearly 10 years ago. She’s worked out of studios in the Aurora Arts District and the hip River North (RiNo) district in Denver, and her frenzied, drippy work with acrylics has earned her exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum, as well as smaller metro-area galleries like Pirate and Ice Cube.
New works hang on the walls of the garage, canvases that depict dreamlike scenes in bright, vibrant tones. A woman is the main focus of “Filet Mignon,” a painting that shows a subject in bright glasses and a boa. The female figure in “Swank” is painted in earthy flesh tones, with snippets of vivid blue and yellow serving as background hues. The subject of “Hammerhead” is hard to pin down — the central figure has dark wings like a bird and bright pink lips. The image shares the canvas with poetry scrawled out in loose, loping handwriting.
In Anderson’s more recent work, it’s easy to see the influence of contemporary painters like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Frohawk Two Feathers and Eddie Martinez. Like those artists, Anderson offers scenes pulled from dreams and visions. She includes words with her images, poetry snippets built of free association.
It’s an approach that hasn’t always resonated with some of her suburban neighbors, Anderson said. She remembers talking to neighbors about her artwork, and fielding questions about painters with styles straight out of Norman Rockwell.
“I grew up in a city that had world-class contemporary art that I was going to see,” she said. “There’s still space to go here. When we get a collecting contemporary art museum, we’ll reach that.”
Until then, Anderson is happy to contribute to the effort, from the comfort of her Aurora garage.
Man of steel: Bill Starke
Bill Starke can no longer fit an everyday life into his home on East Mississippi Avenue. Massive sculptures of human figures sit alongside rolls of bubble wrap and other packing materials in the living room. A giant cast of a human head sits in one corner of a nearby foyer that’s been turned into a studio space; the peaceful facial expression and wide eyes keeping a silent watch over the room’s sketches and models. The garage feels like a sculptor’s dream workshop — it’s crammed with enough industrial tools to keep a small factory running.
Every part of the house has its own role in Starke’s creative process, one that’s turned more and more toward creating metal sculptures of all sizes.
“I just like to make objects. Even when I was painting, I was more interested in doing a specific object than I was in atmospheres and landscapes,” said Starke, a Denver native who specialized in drawing and painting when he studied ar in the 1970s at what is now Metropolitan State University of Denver. “I like making things with my hands. I like the idea of making a solid, concrete object.”
Since 2000, Starke has explored that hands-on approach with care and precision, producing works that have been shown everywhere from galleries in Cherry Creek to European museums. Following his breakthrough success at the Cherry Creek Arts Festival in 2000, Starke’s national and international reputation has skyrocketed.
He’s done commissions for public art in cities like Houston and Atlanta. A public piece at the Orlando Event Center titled “Our Journey” features eight life-sized human figures scaling a seven-story wall. Starke has also created some high-profile pieces of much smaller sizes — a handheld sculpture called “Samaritan” that features one human figure carrying another was recently presented to Bill Gates as an award recognizing his charitable work.
Starke has found enough success to turn his artwork into a full-time profession, but he’s stayed rooted in Aurora. Starke shows and sells his work regularly out of the 1261 Gallery in Denver, and his pieces are cast at a foundry in Loveland. But Starke’s life and craft is still solidly based in the city. He’s converted his house on East Mississippi to his full-time work space, and he lives with his wife in another home on Havana Street.
“I moved here in 1978, because it was at the edge of the world at the time,” Starke said. “This was a brand-new neighborhood … I think we originally moved out here because it was economically feasible. It was a place for me that was affordable, and it’s grown a lot since then.”
Comfortable in the suburban workshop he’s built up for himself in the past three decades, Starke goes about his work like a dedicated worker bee. He’s quick to point out that he came from a working-class family, and there’s a tactile, workmanship quality to Starke’s approach in the studio. He shows the focus and precision of a craftsman as he works on clay models; he displays the functional skill of a factory worker when he dons his protective gear and sets to work on metal casts.
For Starke, it’s all part of a creative process that’s just as primal and accessible as other human trades.
“The visual arts, making things like this, it’s been part of humankind since the very beginning,” Starke said. “It’s always been around. I think making art is an ordinary human activity, just like a baker, a chef or a musician. I’m best at making visual images, and that’s why I’m doing it. But I don’t think it’s something that’s strange or unique.”
Many of Starke’s themes focus on crawling. Pieces spotlight human figures working collectively. “The Climbers,” a cast aluminum piece at the Denver Convention Center, features figures climbing along a wall. Starke says such pieces are all about humanity’s common struggle.
“The human form and figure is the vocabulary I’m using to express ideas,” Starke said. “The theme is the idea of people climbing or working together to get to the next level in life.”
Love beads: Kim Harrell
Kim Harrell’s eyes widen when she talks about petrified mammoth bone and colored beads. Her words spill out faster than you can follow when the conversation turns to wires, rubber and steel.
They’re materials that can be felt, weighed and touched, Harrell explains. They’re the building blocks of a creative style that’s meant to be tactile, a kind of design that’s useful and immediate. Seated at a colorful wooden table in the studio space off of Havana Street that she shares with another artist, Harrell pointed to dozens of examples sitting behind glass in neat display cases. The earrings, bracelets and necklaces of different materials were all meant to worn, weighed and handled.
“For the most part, my jewelry is about the materials and celebrating their qualities, their beauty,” she said. “When you pick up my work, I want it to have a weight. I want it to have a presence. I think I have a sensitivity to that in my work.”
Harrell has skipped between gallery spaces in Aurora since 2004. In that time, she’s kept the same approach to her work. She tackles art in the fashion of a builder or an architect. Her work tools include hammers, chisels and files; she’s not interested in making abstractions for well-to-do museum patrons. She’ll tell you that form follows function and that less is more.
Harrell beams when she speaks of Bauhaus, the early 20th-century German school that fused crafts and fine arts. She gushes about the power of minimalism and efficiency, qualities that shine through in every one of her works.
But she hesitates when it comes to the formal title of “artist.” “I am reluctantly calling myself an artist. I’m not,” Harrell admitted. “I come to my work as a designer. … I can’t make jewelry that you can’t wear. My work comes alive when it’s on somebody.”
Chalk it up to a childhood fascination with earrings, blame it on a childhood skill for untangling necklaces. Whatever her creative roots, Harrell has spent more than a decade refining and developing her distinctive style, and Aurora has been her base for much of that time. She opened the East End Applied Art gallery in Original Aurora almost 10 years ago, and she moved to her current studio – a space she shares with painter Phyllis Rider – in 2010.
In that time, she’s built up a creative presence on a larger scale, commissioning her work to venues like the Denver Art Museum and earning a council spot with the Colorado Creative Industries, an organization that makes arts policy for the entire state.
But she’s also remained firmly rooted in Aurora. Her two daughters are enrolled in the Aurora Public Schools district, she’s made two bids for the Aurora City Council, and she’s been a constant advocate for the local arts scene. She’s also hosted a regular “Jewelry Bar” class in Aurora, a workshop that gives visitors a chance to craft their own wearable art.
“In the fall of 2008, right after the economy crashed, I got inspired to help people to make gifts, because I love beads, and that’s how I got started,” Harrell said. “It’s such a simple and inexpensive way to make jewelry.”
A lot of the inspiration for that involvement and activism came from her time in a foreign country. Harrell, a Denver native, started experimenting with silversmithing and jewelry making as a college student living in London in the early 1990s. She found inspiration in the broader European culture, she said, in an arts scene where jewelers had carved out their own niche. She started showing her work in high-profile London venues like the Goldsmiths’ Hall northeast of St. Paul’s Cathedral; her work was creating buzz among the city’s jewelers and designers.
And that’s when she made the move back to Colorado, a decision that had to do with being a new parent and having a large family network back in the states. But the move meant making inroads in a different kind of cultural scene, an arts world where jewelry and silversmithing didn’t play as big a role.
“There is a jewelry community here, but it’s not like in London. There were these little pockets of jewelry designers … That’s my challenge now,” Harrell said. “I have an eye, I know what I want to see in my work, but I’m not trying to change the world or express anger or love. If anything, I’m trying to express beauty in the material that I use.”
Humanity: Reno Carollo
Reno Carollo spent two years boiling down his life to one word. It started as a simple assignment in a philosophy class: Find a single term to describe yourself, one that you would want included on your tombstone. For Carollo, who’s spent 34 years refining his skills as a sculptor, a jeweler, a gallery manager and a craftsman, finding that single descriptor was a little tricky.
“The only word that I came up with that seems to be applicable to what I do is the word ‘maker,’” Carollo said. “I can make jewelry. I can make sculpture. I’ve worked on making art shows … That’s what that one word is about.”
Carollo’s diverse skill set is clear in the layout of his home in the Village East neighborhood of Aurora. There’s a nook for every specialty, a workshop space for every one of Carollo’s art forms. Considering that Carollo still lives in the home that’s doubled as his workspace since 2004, that flexibility is impressive.
“Because I live in a homeowners’ association, there are certain rules and regulations you have to follow. Maybe some other artists wouldn’t want to do that,” Carollo said. “I can only run tools between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. I don’t want to get my neighbors upset.”
The garage is a seasonal workshop, a place Carollo comes to in the spring and summer to work on large-scale sculpture models. He uses the soldering, cutting, cleaning and drill equipment in the basement to make his jewelry, and he heads to the foyer to sketch new ideas or craft wax models for future projects. The living room also functions as an exhibition hall — massive sculptures of human figures sit beside the television and the sofa.
His sculptures return to the idea of the human figure in basic, geometric forms. Many have the look and feel of Art Deco pieces, and the themes come down to questions of basic humanity.
“There’s a school of thought … changing the human figure, using space and shape and plane and convex and concave space. It’s using principles in art that I just really like,” Carollo said. “It’s simplicity. I don’t do faces, because we all share a human issue.”
Carollo may create from his home, but he’s not content to keep his work packed up in his basement or his garage. He has public sculptures installed in Evergreen, Grand Junction and Colorado Springs. He has collectors in California, New York and Chicago. What’s more, as a former gallery owner who helped spark the revival of art scenes in Denver neighborhoods like Old South Pearl Street, Carollo has worked to make art a part of public and civic life.
His hometown of Aurora is no exception. As a commissioner on the city’s Arts in Public Places Commission for the past five years, Carollo has helped lead the push to set up art on the city’s public streets. He was a driving force behind the inaugural “ART 2C on Havana” contest, a competition that put public sculptures on one of Aurora’s busiest streets.
Carollo sees that effort as an important step in making art more accessible to everyone in the city.
“In music, they’ve taken their art form and found a way to minimize the cost so that everybody has accessibility to it,” Carollo said. “For museums and art schools, there’s been that aura of, ‘We’re so unique. You can’t get into this.’ The challenge is that everybody could be a part of this process.”
Spreading that message effectively is all about education, Carollo insisted. It’s a matter of getting more people familiar with the creative process, and it’s a question of getting more people to buy original art for their homes and offices. Carollo recently posed those very questions to a friend who had been bemoaning the state of the art scene in Colorado.
“He said, ‘I don’t buy art.’ I said, ‘There’s one of the reasons we have a challenge,’” Carollo said with a wry smile. “I can show you one-of-a-kind pieces of artwork for $50.” Walking through Carollo’s maze of home studio and exhibition space and taking in his work of all sizes, it’s pretty easy to see that he’s not lying.
Cut and dried: Michael Keyes
The pace of life is different in the rural stretches of Athens, Ohio. Nestled along the Hocking River, the historic college town is steeped in folklore and ancient tradition. Ohio University draws plenty of young students to the college every semester, but the families who live here carry stories and struggles that go back generations. That sense of history comes through vividly in the woodblock prints of Michael Keyes, a new arrival in Aurora who lived in Athens for decades.
“It’s considered an Appalachian county, so there are foothills to the Appalachian Mountains,” Keyes said as he flipped through his portfolio at the Red Delicious Press gallery on East Colfax Avenue in Aurora. The prints showed scenes from those foothills, landscapes featuring trailers, cottages and families gathered on front porches. “It’s a college town, but it’s in a rural part of Ohio. It was a coal mining area historically, so this imagery is of regular folks in their environment with natural elements.”
It’s easy to imagine Keyes in that kind of setting. With his stocky white beard, his gray hair and his gentle, measured manner, Keyes cuts a quaint and thoughtful figure. His art also speaks to simplicity and deep tradition — woodblock printmaking goes back hundreds of years, partly because it requires only ink, wood, paper and a sharp blade.
Keyes moved to Aurora with his wife late last year, mainly to be closer to his son, his daughter-in-law and his grandson. He holds a master’s degree in fine arts, but his work was rooted far outside the studio. For 25 years, he worked in the federal weatherization program, helping low-income families conserve energy through insulation, furnace repair, ventilation and other means. Those families would be depicted in later his prints.
After retiring, Keyes and his wife decided to head to Colorado. Soon after arriving in Aurora in November, Keyes discovered the Red Delicious Press in the Aurora Arts District, the only gallery and workshop in the metro area devoted solely to printmaking.
Keyes paid the dues to become a member of the Red Delicious collective of printmakers. It’s given him access to the gallery’s massive industrial press, a tool that has helped to rekindle his interest in printmaking. In Ohio, he had to make his prints by hand. That meant rubbing the ink onto paper using a plastic spoon, a process that required plenty of time and patience.
“It takes a while. It takes a long time,” Keyes said. “It’s very fortunate that I came upon the press.”
The resource will help Keyes realize new creative ideas as he and his wife settle into their new home in Aurora. He’s already started sketches for new prints, landscapes that echo the tone and theme of his work from Athens. Keyes finds beauty in street scenes from north Aurora, in the food carts on Havana Street and the pedestrians on East Colfax Avenue.
“I can foresee going down on Colfax and doing some sketches, a combination of people and architecture, the signage and the colors,” Keyes said, citing inspiration from the everyday scenes painted by Vincent Van Gogh in the late 1800s. “His feeling for regular people and for landscapes, just the dignity that people have and portraying that dignity is a very valuable thing to do in life.”
Keyes hinted at the possibility of exploring new art forms. He’s interested in oil painting and in different forms of print making. But his roots remain in the fundamental form of relief printing, a process that first captured his interest as a grade schooler growing up in Ohio.
“When I was in grade school, I was fascinated by the possibility of being able to cut your initials into an eraser and take a stamp pad and print that way. It’s the same kind of printing. It’s relief printing,” Keyes said. “What you leave on the surface is what prints when you ink it.”
It’s immediate, direct and beautiful, Keyes said, much like the straightforward subjects that he loves to portray.
Recycler: Satya Wimbish
Satya Wimbish doesn’t crawl around in trash bins as often as she used to. It’s not that she’s lost her passion for Dumpster diving, for discovering discarded gems that she can turn into original pieces of art. Old wooden sinks, paper napkins, blocks of wood, pet carriers, discarded newspapers – all of these objects have transformed in Wimbish’s hands. With the right combination of paint, glue, glitter and innovation, Wimbish has turned all of these materials into paintings, sculptures, furniture and other works of art.
“When I first started using recycled materials, it was an accident,” Wimbish said from her perch on a couch at The Collection gallery on East Colfax Avenue. Her own artwork and pieces by friends and fellow artists decorated the room. Canvases sat against the window waiting to be hung; sculptures rendered from old water coolers and dresser drawers leaned against furniture; and wooden blocks painted in acrylic colors sat on homemade tables. “I was at McDonald’s, hanging out with my friends, and I started drawing a piece on a napkin. After I did about six of them, I noticed I could make one piece.”
She used 12 of those napkins to make a larger collage, and her passion for found materials kicked off in earnest. From there, she’d hit up trash cans and Dumpsters near her Aurora apartment to find her creative muse. A few years ago, she even turned her artistic style into a business called “Trash As Art.” She produces “eco art” for clients; she builds furniture and accessories out of old materials. Wimbish can rattle off her past efforts at a dizzying pace: She studied video production, journalism, teaching, public service, restorative justice and grant writing before she started her own business.
But an interest in art has always been in the background, she said, and finding a new use for old material gave her a forum to follow a frantic, frenetic muse.
“I started off Dumpster diving and getting stuff from there,” Wimbish said. A formal business license came next. “I had done all the research on how to start a business, but I had never gone and got licensed … When I made it into a business, all of a sudden, I started caring more.”
But lately, Wimbish hasn’t had as much time to look for discarded treasures for her business. She’s been too busy working on developing Aurora’s native arts district, reaching out to fellow artists, teaching workshops and invigorating the local gallery scene.
Since signing up for a volunteer position with the Aurora Arts District more than a year ago, she’s become one of the organization’s most visible and passionate advocates. She’s the current manager of The Collection, a privately owned space at 9801 E. Colfax Ave. that’s been refitted as a public gallery. Since taking over last year, Wimbish has helped organize first-time exhibitions that feature the work of local artists. She’s also led classes and workshops for students of all ages. One workshop, titled “Rummage,” gave high school kids the chance to dig through their own mini-dumpsters (boxes of selected found materials) to build their own masterpieces.
“I’ve always had a passion for helping people to succeed, especially in the area of the arts. I don’t know why,” said Wimbish, a native of Massachusetts who lived in Washington for a stretch before landing in Colorado in the 1990s. “It’s letting them know that they can do it. Me, I never formally studied art … It was something to have fun with, to be creative.”
Her work displayed at The Collection showed that informal attitude, carefree approach and ambitious scope. A piece on wood titled “Sugar Cookies” incorporated glitter, paint and plastic grass. Wimbish’s ceramic vases and cups sat on shelves in the back, and she pointed to a visually busy piece called “I Have an Idea” as a window into her creative process.
“This is my head when I am working,” she said, pointing to the furious combination of color and line spelled out on a wooden block.
She laughed as she held up her work, an endearing and earnest artist showing her work in a casual setting.
“I hope with this gallery, we can set a precedent as far as what galleries can do in Aurora,” she said. “We have real artists, we have good shows, but we also help up-and-coming people. We’re going to keep doing that.”
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