Fun touring with Agnes in the Bug.
My childhood, from about the age of nine, was spent on the wide plains of eastern Colorado in a small farming and ranching community. Each year was peppered with extended pilgrimages to my mother’s homeland, the Dominican Republic, and sojourns to my father's central Texas roots.
My parents were what people used to call “gentlemen farmers”. Forty acres held a large organic garden, a barn with a few horses, cows, and chickens who generously shared with us their milk and eggs, a couple of dogs and a pint-sized, hard-bitten old farmhouse that looked like an afterthought ~ dropped from the sky onto forty acres of wild prairie. And of course, my pig, Sweet Agnes.
Throughout my youth, we remained connected to the Denver art world through my grandparents, who were art supporters and art collectors and whose home held an extensive, museum-quality collection. And also through my parents' long standing friendships and working relationships with some of Denver’s more prominent artists and architects. Additionally ~ because there was an abundance of time and an absence of diversion (our nearest neighbor was a half-mile down the road) ~ almost all of my free time was dedicated to artistic endeavors, thanks to my ever resourceful and wonderfully creative mother.
It was within this landscape that I learned to appreciate the natural world, to see it as a canvas for psychological introspection and artistic reflection and expression. It is where I would initiate the creative conversation between what goes on in the head and what is formed by the hand that continues, many years later, to surprise, enrich, and sustain me.
My parents were what people used to call “gentlemen farmers”. Forty acres held a large organic garden, a barn with a few horses, cows, and chickens who generously shared with us their milk and eggs, a couple of dogs and a pint-sized, hard-bitten old farmhouse that looked like an afterthought ~ dropped from the sky onto forty acres of wild prairie. And of course, my pig, Sweet Agnes.
Throughout my youth, we remained connected to the Denver art world through my grandparents, who were art supporters and art collectors and whose home held an extensive, museum-quality collection. And also through my parents' long standing friendships and working relationships with some of Denver’s more prominent artists and architects. Additionally ~ because there was an abundance of time and an absence of diversion (our nearest neighbor was a half-mile down the road) ~ almost all of my free time was dedicated to artistic endeavors, thanks to my ever resourceful and wonderfully creative mother.
It was within this landscape that I learned to appreciate the natural world, to see it as a canvas for psychological introspection and artistic reflection and expression. It is where I would initiate the creative conversation between what goes on in the head and what is formed by the hand that continues, many years later, to surprise, enrich, and sustain me.
