Member Newsletter: Winter 2024

First, let’s talk about your work as an artist. What sparked your passion for painting and landscapes?

Well, a lot of artists say this, but I’ve always been an artist, as a child loving to draw and whatnot. My wife (Sushe) is the same, as a child going to art classes and so forth.

As I got into young adulthood and out of high school, I started working in a gallery in Colorado Springs, where I’m originally from. I just really started to get interested in the regional art of Colorado – artists that worked in the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, ’60s even.

A lot of those works would come into the gallery and I just became really fascinated by how a lot of those early artists in the 1930s – the regionalists – approached any subject, but specifically, landscape.

I was really fascinated by how these artists would stylize the landscape instead of trying to depict it in a photorealist way. I appreciated how they would transform mountains into almost wedges and just simplify the landscape.

My wife was a well-established artist and we started working together. She also was attracted by a lot of the same art styles. She first started to create work for the gallery world, and then I soon started experimenting with my own painting technique and landscapes. All of that started in the 1980s. It’s just evolved from there. My love has never stopped.

I rapidly started collecting a lot of the artists that I admired.

Tell us about collecting. Do you specifically collect those regional Colorado artists?

Mostly Colorado. It’s a lot harder to collect today because it’s become extremely popular, but when I was collecting it, there were only a handful of us and there was a lot of work out there.

When I married Sushe in 1984, we started our own gallery. A lot of the artwork would just come into the gallery – either people were framing it or they wanted to sell it. I started meeting a lot of the artists who were still alive from that time period and I just started horse trading with a lot of these other artists. I was poor as ever and couldn’t afford to just buy them outright, so I would either paint something myself and trade them or whatever.

Tell us about that gallery.

It was called the Tracy Felix Arts Space. It primarily showed contemporary art from mostly artists from Colorado Springs.

But also, because of my love of regionalist art, we also started showing a number of artists who were still alive from that time period. They were elderly people at that time and I think they just appreciated that somebody in their 30s, Sue and I both, wanted to show them and admired their work. We showed a lot of artists from the Colorado Springs period that were still around.

How did you first connect with the Kirkland Museum?

I met (Founding Director & Curator Emeritus) Hugh Grant on the phone first, because I was interested in some of the Denver regionalist artists like William Sanderson and Vance Kirkland and a number of them.

He had not started the museum quite yet but was putting feelers out into the art world. We had several other mutual friends who introduced us to each other.

How did conversations begin about acquiring some of your work for Kirkland Museum’s collection?

It started literally right before we moved to Denver in the early 2000s. About one year before we moved here, Hugh purchased a piece of each of our work.

When we moved to Denver, we rapidly became involved with the museum because it’s right up our alley of interest. Hugh is just such a dear, dear person, and we fell in love with the museum and Hugh. The museum spoke to us. All of his focus on Colorado artists made us just jump full bore into the museum world with him. We felt like we had a home.

Hugh started rabidly collecting our work, and, since we had so many pieces from the early regionalist periods in Colorado, we started gifting some of the pieces to Hugh. He bought several pieces from us, but we also simultaneously gifted many pieces to him. It’s just been this mutual friendship and love of art and Colorado, and we’ve just continued on today.

Tell me about the significance of Kirkland Museum to you and why you choose to support it.

So many cities want to have museums that are about other places; they don’t want to focus on what happens in their own region. For some reason, some museums think that that makes them look, I don’t know, small town-ish, and actually, I think exactly the opposite.

That’s why the (New Mexico Museum of Art) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is so significant because they have no problem featuring their own history. The focus of the Kirkland Museum’s art collection is Colorado, and that is right up my alley. I love that idea and nobody else is doing it. I am just full-bore in support of that.

Now that it is merged with the Denver Art Museum – which I’m very supportive of and I think will keep the museum surviving beyond my lifetime – I hope that the regional focus stays the same. The focus of the Kirkland Museum is special, and I think people visiting Denver, especially, look at that and go, “Wow, this is impressive, these people are all from Colorado.”

I think people want that, they want to see something new and different from everyone else, and that’s exactly what the Kirkland Museum is doing.

I love it all. I love that it’s older artists and newer artists. I just love that it has a Colorado focus. I love that the Kirkland Museum mixes it with the decorative arts and the furniture collection. We’re also heavily into modernism. The house, the furniture, the whole nine yards, so the Kirkland Museum has all of it.