I’ve always admired people who can look at something ordinary and see something the rest of us don’t. A painter sees a color in the landscape you’ve driven past a hundred times. A photographer catches a moment you might not have noticed. A sculptor looks at a piece of wood, stone, or metal and already has an idea of what it could become. Then, perhaps even more impressively, they know how to actually make it.
I got to spend time getting to know some of those people for this issue, and it reminded me just how much creativity exists in Colorado. There are painters and photographers, sculptors and makers, people working in studios and workshops across the state to create things simply because they believe something should exist that didn’t before. There’s something I really love about that.
We spend so much of our lives consuming things quickly. We scroll past images, replace what breaks, and move on to whatever is next. Art asks us to do the opposite. Someone spent hours, months, or sometimes years making a single thing, and our only job is to stop long enough to look at it.
That’s what our Arts Issue celebrates: the people who make beautiful, interesting, and occasionally wonderfully weird things, and the places across Colorado where we get to experience them. You don’t have to know much about art to appreciate it. You just have to pay attention.
For the print-exclusive The Arts Issue cover feature, download the digital magazine or pick up a copy from select local King Soopers, Safeway, Tattered Cover, or Barnes & Noble locations.
