Elsewhere Studios Residency, Paonia, Colorado

watercolor and ink on paper, December, 2018

Pastel and ink on paper

Residency Statement-

History perceives it as a coal mining town. Existing next to a national park, the town is now fighting against a pipeline waiting to be installed, only to fracture the beautiful landscapes and potentially destroy them forever. Unless you are among the percentage who is looking forward to the drilling and the jobs that will pop up as a result, then you have bigger concerns aside from bruising the land—and that right there is only the condensed version.

When I first got to Paonia, I found myself so obsessed with the need to create art with a purpose. It wasn’t until after three hours of internet scrolling with seven tabs open trying to fully understand the place I was living in, that I realized I was approaching the situation completely wrong.

I was just granted the opportunity to move to a completely new place with zero expectations, except create a body of work and be able present it before I left. What I didn’t realize is there’s a different way to access to all the information I needed without having collect research at my laptop for hours, and I had already started doing it.

The first three days after my arrival, I hiked up the same hill that overlooked town and photographed the landscapes. I was interested to see how things changed day by day; the way the clouds fogged over the mountains, creating horizon lines in shades of blue one day, while the sun shed light on new details and peaks the next. Walking through town, there were a few offices and a town newspaper that supplied all the information I needed to know–but I didn’t even need to go that far. What I realized is that this is a small town composed mostly of residents who have spent their whole life invested in this community. All I had to do was stop by the market a block away and start asking questions to the person standing behind the cash register and I could get the information I needed tied into their own perspective built by direct experience as well.

This is the way time slowed down. This is how I realized I could wake up every day and set one intention: learn something that would contribute further to understanding the history and current conditions of the town and land. Beyond that, absorb everything and just create work. The rest will follow. There is no reason to force this desire to become well versed in a certain subject with regard to the life here. I could spend the rest of my life researching topics that are in one way or another relevant to the environmental, political, or cultural standings of Paonia. I’d still be missing out on the piece that holds more value than all of that: what the people here can teach me alone and what I can absorb directly from day to day experiences. By expecting little and opening myself up to learning anything and everything about this little town in the middle of a valley, west of rural Colorado, I got to learn the unfiltered, personal side of the story.