My Summer Residency and Solo Road Trip

The road from Pagosa Springs, CO to Denver, co. This is right before the second scariest mountain I have ever driven.

This summer I spent a week and a half traveling the South West. I got a scholarship from Anderson Ranch to go for a week for a workshop and a grant from Northern Arizona University to pay for the rest of my travel and lodging. There were a few options for getting to the camp, but I love road trips. They have been some of my favorite vacations and I think the journey is one of the best parts. I also hate airports and flying so my only real option was to drive. I was the only person who got these scholarships so this was a solo excursion for me. I started in Flagstaff on the 3rd of July and drove 12 hours to Denver where I stayed overnight at a hostel. I spent the 4th of July in Denver going to the art museum and recovering from the longest drive I’ve done in my life.

The next day I did the scariest drive I have ever done, Independence Pass, that took me to Aspen/Snowmass Village where Anderson Ranch is located. I spent a week there having an absolute sculpture brain melt. I swear there are only so many ways you can think of a still life and abstract it, but I was told there were endless possibilities. I doubt that, I would have gotten bored if we weren’t switching the sculpting medium every day. I spent hours in the studio looking at and zooming in and out of this still life, looking at the points of connection. How the crucible tongs balance on the wooden log, how the slope of the shovel connects to the ground gradually rather than the abrupt legs of the saw horse. Learning from our instructor, Jillaine Jones, was fantastic. I think one of the best things I learned from her was that you could be a practicing artist and still be successful, but only through true devotion to your practice. I asked Jillaine if there was anything that she did to “feed her practice” outside of sculpture, which is a pretentious way to ask if she does anything fun, and she said “no, just sculpture”. I would say that sculpture and art are my fun. I have to worry about my normal life outside of art where I have to go to my receptionist job or pay bills, to be only involved in art would be an absolute dream.

I wouldn’t have been able to make it out alive from the sculpture based torture chambers (an extreme hyperbole) if it weren’t for the friends I made in that workshop. I am very bad at guessing people’s ages, which led me to initially thinking that everyone was around my age (22) and I was shocked to find out I was the youngest person there by a few years at least. Making friends in the art world that are older than you is intimidating since you don’t have the same amount of experience, but also exciting because I can see what I have to look forward to. I got to see art from other people who were established artists and professors in different mediums, but were trying sculpture for the first time. On the last day of the camp we finished critique and almost all of us went to the tiny smoking area at the back of the camp to have a celebratory cigarette.

After a little under a week at Anderson Ranch, I started the journey home going through New Mexico. I stopped in Taos, NM to see a show on Adobe at the Harwood Gallery and stayed the night at the Santa Fe International Hostel (highly recommend it!). While in New Mexico I also saw some of the more tourist-y things, I went to the Earthships outside of Taos and Meow Wolf Santa Fe. I then made the shorter 5 hour drive home to Flagstaff, where I promptly went out with friends, had a few drinks, and lost at pool.

Photos