Southwest Art Magazine Eight Paint Colorado
Kang Cho, Joellyn Duesberry, Diane Massey Dunbar, Kevin Weckbach, George Strickland, Dan Young, Jill Soukup, and Hollis Williford
In the mountains, as well as on the high plains of Colorado, the temperature can change 50 degrees between noon and nightfall. The sun shines here more than it does on any other state. Most summer days, storms gather over the Rocky Mountains and blow east across the plains by the afternoon, and a winter storm can drop several feet of snow only to melt the next day or two under the intense sun. Unpredictable and ever changing, these ingredients combined with the dramatic landscape make Colorado a painter’s paradise.
Ever since artists Albert Bierstadt, for whom a mountain is named, Charles Partridge Adams, and photographer William Henry Jackson began documenting the West in the 18th and 19th centuries, Colorado has attracted hundreds, if not thousands of artists on their own journeys to do the same. Many have found their artistic voice amid the mountains, lakes, waterfalls, plains and canyons. The list would be to great to detail, but the following group of eight Coloradans are as diverse as the terrain. From the high country to urban settings, these painters each uniquely speak of the land by putting brush to canvas to tell their story.
During a blizzard in 1982 that shut down Denver and cost the town’s mayor his job because his city was so ill-prepared to handle the snow, artist Kang Cho suited up in duck hunting garb, ski mask and gloves, packed his easel and hit the streets. Only two lanes of Colfax, a major artery running east and west through Denver, were open. But, with the town at a stand still anyway, Cho set-up in the middle of the street and painted. The stunt landed his face on the front page of a local paper and is a story many of his contemporaries remember to this day. Undaunted by severe weather, Cho’s insists that one of his favorite times to paint is during the coldest days of winter. He explained, “You don’t get that kind of air and atmosphere any other time. All the colors, even the sun, are filtered through a lot of fog and moisture. There is no way you can paint that on a sunny day.”
Since he’s usually out during Colorado’s worst weather, Cho often gets the question, how can you paint such sensitive images wearing bulky gloves?, to which, he replies, “Your mind is painting. Your hand is just a matter of coordination.” Because he is so dedicated to putting himself in the middle of his subject matter, Cho’s landscapes go beyond mere interpretation – they give viewers a sense of time and place that is specifically Colorado.
Born and raised in Korea, Cho came to Denver after studying at the American Academy of Art in Chicago. Wanting to continue his education after graduation he moved to Denver to work with William Sharer and Mark Daily, both artists who had graduated before him from the Academy and since moved west. Almost thirty years have passed since and, like so many others, Cho has stayed to explore his art in this rich landscape.
These days, the first snows in the high country often lour Cho out of the city in search of the perfect combination of atmosphere, light and pattern. He will paint in solitude for hours in all kinds of weather just to capture naked aspens, willows and flaming red dogwoods against the freshly fallen snow.
A two person show of Cho’s work opened the middle of December at Knox Galleries in Denver, and a one man show opens at Knox in Beaver Creek, CO January 31. Cho’s work can also be seen at the Knox Galleries in Naples, FL and Trailside Galleries in Jackson, WY and Scottsdale, AZ.
When Joellyn Duesberry received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1985, she was already an established artist who lived and worked on the East Coast. The grant, however, allowed her to quit her part time job as an art appraiser and head west to study with Richard Diebenkorn in Santa Fe, NM. The intense month with Diebenkorn shook things loose in Duesberry that she had pushed aside, primarily what she 
calls her ‘inner abstract world’. That same year, Duesberry married and moved west to Colorado.
Having spent her entire painting career up to that point in the east where light filters through heavier atmosphere, the arid west with its clear bright light was bit of a jolt for Duesberry. She explained, “In the east, everything shares edges due to humidity, which diffuses and pearlizes the air. In the west, everything is hard edges. It’s very precise, absolute light and absolute dark.”
Duesberry was born and raised in Richmond, VA. She graduated from Smith College, Northampton, MA with a double major in art history and painting then went on to receive a masters degree from the New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. She lived in Manhattan for 20 years working as an appraiser and studying art until receiving the NEA grant that changed her life.
But that was almost two decades ago. Over that time, she has traveled extensively throughout the West and across the globe continually challenging herself with new and different light and subjects. Most recently, a film by Amie Knox for submission to PBS was made based on her painting process and covered from start to finish the development of the enormous painting Above Elk River. Duesberry wrote, “I began the painting out of doors so I could think like the river thinks. I had to comprehend that being on a very high cliff, which precipitously dropped into the river valley would require a bird’s eye view of not only the river, but also I had to compositionally imply the ricochet effect of water slamming into riverbank and repelling toward the next riverbank in a very serpentine composition. The big ‘S’ curve, as an abstract structure, became the continuum on which I hung all other directional movement, allowing me to reveal a tension between geometry in depth and geometry on the surface, the balancing of which is always my underlying intension in composing from nature.”
A body of her work in monotypes was organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond in a book entitled “A Covenant of Seasons,” along with an exhibit that is currently touring of the country through 2004. The Denver Art Museum honored her with a retrospective show of 20 years of her painting and she recently completed a grant for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council where she spent five months painting on the 91st floor of the World trade Center. The Graham Gallery in New York, Gleason Fine Art, Boothbay Harbor and Camden, ME, and the Gallery 1261 in Denver, CO all represent her work. Complete biography, images and show dates can be found online at www.joellynduesberry.com.
Dianne Massey Dunbar paints what touches her life, what she knows and loves. She doesn’t have to look too hard for subject matter, a tea cup and lemons left over from breakfast or a woman folding clothes at the Laundromat are often enough. “I’m drawn to ordinary things in ordinary settings. I find that has its own sense of beauty,” she said. “Beauty for me is not necessarily found in roses and pretty women.”
Dunbar studied painting as a child and continued to paint into young adulthood. But when she started a family, things changed. Her son had special needs that forced her to work two jobs to pay for his medical bills. Though she continued to paint it was hard to make progress with only a few hours here and there. It wasn’t until years later when she became ill that she turned back to her art to help focus the negative into something positive. She took classes at the Art Students League of Denver and started to get out doors and paint en plein air. Because painting on location can be strenuous, Dunbar must carefully plan out these trips.
“It is exhilarating,” she said. “The light moves quickly because the atmosphere is thinner. And, despite the obstacles, I see things more clearly when I’m out on location. I’ve learned, though, that you have to be prepared for the unexpected. Frequently in Colorado you don’t have a lot of warning about the weather.” Like the day she went up to Rocky Mountain National Park to start work on a commission. The weather was clear in Denver but by the time she arrived at the park almost two hours later, the mountains were shrouded in fog. She was having a hard time gathering any information for the commission but, she recalled, “I had just set up my easel when it started to rain – we were literally in the clouds. Then I saw the fisherman at Sprague Lake and I was immediately taken by his form and shadow. I had to paint him.”
Dianne Massey Dunbar currently shows at Gallery 1261.
Though Denver native Kevin Weckbach has traveled around Europe, China, Nepal, and Japan, he still calls Colorado home. He’s not picky about subject matter as much as he is concerned with how the shapes of things come together. Weckbach particularly enjoys painting the buildings in his neighborhood near lower downtown Denver. Ponce Pawns (Appliance, TV, Furniture) is one such place. He like the way the sign and its shadow looked against the sky and street so he set up his easel and painted.
The 6’5” artists says he usually doesn’t get hassled too much when he’s painting on the streets but he did have a guy try to start a fight with him. “I don’t know, I think he was drunk. Usually people are nice,” he said. But, still he prefers to work out on location just incase the unexpected shadow or stream of light crosses over his subject matter creating some unusually stimulating visual element.
Weckbach tries to paint every day, sometimes on location other times working in his studio from line drawings he makes while he’s out. He doesn’t paint from photographs unless, by the end of a painting, he feels that he needs to add back detail.
Of painting urban scenes, he said, “The city reminds me of miniatures, like I’m painting toys, something artificial. The shapes and color range are things you wouldn’t see outside the city – a red building next to gray and black buildings. It’s like a child’s toy box dumped up-side-down.” And, because he’s not interested in creating exact replicas of what he sees, he says the play of light off the buildings allows him to simplify his paintings so he can make broader statements in art, statements, he says, that are a bit like orchestrating music.
Weckbach studied art at the Rocky Mountains School of Design and the Art Students League of Denver. He currently shows his work at Gallery 1261 in Denver, CO; and, Left Bank Gallery, Wesley, MA.
Painting to George Strickland is the way he connects with the world around him. Originally from Texas, Strickland’s wife’s company moved them to Reno, NV then on to Parker, CO. The transfer to Reno prompted him to make a sizeable leap of his own: he quit commercial illustration in favor of giving fine art a shot. The result has been an ever growing recognition for his work.
Strickland prefers to paint outside on location and gets into the mountains whenever possible. He says it is the many moods of nature that connect him in a deeper, more spiritual way. And, it’s these painting excursions that give him the time and space to look closer, see more clearly. Though challenging, painting plein air has also forced him to sift through all the details. He said, “It’s easy to get overwhelmed with what’s before you. The hardest thing to learn is to simplify.”
When heading out to paint on location, Strickland says he looks for a scene that he can visualize as paint. He said, “By making myself see it as paint, the visual qualities such as contrast, color, and patterns become my focus.”
Strickland is the current president of the Plein Air Painters of America and he shows with El Presidio in Tucson, AZ; Trailside Galleries in Scottsdale, AZ; and, Wild Horse Gallery in Steamboat Springs, CO.
Growing up on the Western Slope, Dan Young learned his home town well through fishing and camping. But the small agricultural community became too confining for him after while. He moved away to Denver to study at the Colorado Institute of Art. After graduating he took a job in Dallas which lead to freelance work that kept him too busy to make it back for even a quick vacation. But all that change the summer of 1989 when he did escape the pressures of work and came back to rural Colorado. Young says that on that trip he had an epiphany: He decided he just couldn’t go back, he
was going to make it as a landscape painter.
“It’s probably a good thing I didn’t know how hard it would be,” he said laughing. “I thought, I’m a successful illustrator. I can do this. Well, I basically starved for three years.”
Young moved in with his parents and started painting. He called on several artists he knew and respected and they gave him the best advice: Leave your camera at home, get out of your studio and paint.
Years of hard work have definitely paid off for Young. Now the galleries are calling on him and his work is in demand. But like the artist, his home town has also grown up. Where there once were family farms, hay fields and big red barns, golf courses and subdivisions have taken over. “It’s been strange for me growing up here. When I started painting these little scenes I began to notice that after a while I’d go back but they had disappeared. It didn’t start out as a mission but now when I hear of a new development going up, I rush out to paint the farm before it’s gone.”
Young is represented by Simpson Gallagher Gallery in Cody, WY; Basalt Gallery, Basalt, CO; Legacy Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ; Merrill Johnson Gallery, Denver, CO; and Demott Gallery, Vail, CO.
It’s not that Jill Soukup doesn’t think places like national parks and forests aren’t beautiful, it’s just that she prefers painting the city with all it’s angular, hard edges and mechanical objects. “Sunlit buildings, factories, cars and bikes all catch my eye. The light in this part of the country is more dramatic since we don’t have the haze to influence the color and soften the angles. There is just something about architecture that inspires me.”
Soukup started painting in the city when she joined a group of artists that met to paint en plein air. The group always seemed to pick some old house or interesting building to paint. She had just graduated with a bachelors of fine art from Colorado State University, Fort Collins, and was continuing her education at the Art Students League of Denver.
Though she still does some painting on location, she tends to spend most of her time in the studio. She takes a digital camera with her wherever she goes to capture scenes like the row of lampposts along 17th Street in downtown at dusk that caught her eye as she raced off to a gallery opening. Then back in her studio, Soukup takes her digital shots and prints them off in black and white. From the prints she redesigns the composition by drawing small sketches before she tackles the subject on canvas. Painting like this, she says she can be more expressive. “When I paint on location I tend to be more literal but when I work from my black and white photo I get more creative with color and design because I can filter out the nitty-gritty details,” she said.
Since high school, Soukup has been recognized for her talent. She have received numerous awards and honors, including the National Scholastic Portfolio Competition New York Scholarship. Currently, she shows at Abend Gallery, Denver; Eisenhauer Gallery on Martha’s Vineyard; and, Stewart Gallery, Boise, Idaho.
Born and raised in north central Texas, Hollis Williford, was 14 years old when he first set foot in Colorado. After a 10 day boy scout trip of camping, fishing and climbing, he decided then and there that one day he would make his home near those mountains. It wasn’t until he graduated from the prestigious Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles that he got his chance.
In 1971, Williford had been living in LA and making a living as an illustrator when a friend and fellow illustrator, John Zahourek, who was living in Colorado came to see him. Zahourek noticed that Williford’s walls were covered in drawings he had made of Native Americans and so connected Williford to the art scene in Colorado, specifically Ned Jacobs who was doing similar things. “I was starved for the outdoors,” said Williford. “I called Skip Whitcomb and asked him to find me a studio. He did and I moved out right away. Within a month I was hunting and fishing.”
The artist community he found in Colorado was generous and not at all proprietary. He joined a group that sketched together once a week and continues to this day. “There is a great deal of respect in this community,” he said. He also started painting en plein air after being prompted by fellow painters.
Williford’s sensitive approach to all subject matter whether the land or its people, has earned him high praise from the National Academy of Western Art, the Prix de West and the Museum of Native American Art. His 12 foot tall monument entitled “Welcome Sundown” is permanently on display in front of the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City. Williford’s belief that first-hand experience is the foundation of truth in art has sent him throughout Europe and into Canada in search of knowledge about subjects he’s interested in portraying. The time he spent with Indian tribes in the United States and with the Athabascan people of the Northwest Territories has inspired some of his most timeless and notable pieces.
Hollis Williford passed away in January 2007. I miss you, Hollis. RF