Each fall Denver Arts Week celebrates The Mile High City's vibrant arts and culture scene. Here are five local artists you need to know. Their work spans everything from oil painting to photography.
Tim Mooney
style/technique: “abscape” paintings
Q: When did you find your current niche as an artist?
I have several niches as a creative artist, but my current niche itch (couldn’t resist!) is a style of painting I call “abscapes.” I grew up in Central Valley, Calif., a rich farmland crisscrossed with row upon row of crops, vines and fruit trees, hedged in by rolling foothills. At 18 I got out of the small town fast and fell in love with cities. Suddenly, the images of urban and rural, civilization and nature, culture and creation wanted equal time in my paintings, thus the title “abscapes” — landscapes and abstract elements.
Q: What was the first medium or art form that you found a passion for?
My girlfriend bought me a watercolor set for my birthday and I set out to make a few paintings. However, I was going it all wrong, of course! Then I stumbled across a flea market in Sonoma, Calif., and found a large box of acrylic paint for cheap! I bought the whole box, began experimenting and I fell in love!
Q: What is your favorite piece that you have done during your career?
How is an artist to choose?! I have a 4x5 foot abstract with geometric and organic forms in the dark, brooding grays and off-blues that captures something of the shadow side of life; the not-knowing what we all go through. Then I have a 5x7 foot landscape, a scene overlooking Lake Merritt just after sunset that took me months to finish. But perhaps the one that stands out most is a painting of my father who died six years ago. At Christmas I had taken a photograph of him with his intense eyes, capturing that in-between moment when he would break out in laughter or crack the whip with his discipline. It was the first time I used my abstract style to do a portrait and it came out just right. When I showed it to my mother she fell in love with it and, of course, I gave it to her. Only after it lived with me for a year though as I just couldn’t part with it!
Q: What do you love about what you do?
I love the creative freedom to truly express what is within me; to capture the essence of what is experienced by others and to experience those moments when those two meet and someone falls in love with one of my paintings. One experience of this was when a Napa winery owner bought a vineyard painting of mine. I was so curious — why buy a painting of a vineyard when you can look out your window! He said “Your painting captures a feeling that gets at the heart of what a vineyard is all about, but it’s not seen or experienced every day at the vineyard. When I look at your painting, I get that feeling every time.”
Q: What is one of the biggest challenges you face in your line of work?
One of the biggest challenges is to simultaneously stay true to my own inner vision and stay open to new influences and directions. After success it can be seductive to stay with what has worked, even when the soul is pushing the art in new uncertain directions. It’s never a straight line, which is what makes it difficult, and what gives it so much life!
Q: Tell us a random fact about you!
I’ll give you two: First, I am also a singer/songwriter who is THIS close to releasing my first EP! I love to compose and perform! Secondly, I am a Presbyterian pastor who has attended Burning Man for the past seven years!
Bryan Dahlberg
artistic medium: photography
Q: When did you find your current niche as an artist?
As an art major in college, I realized that my lack of skill in draftsmanship would always handicap my artistic ambition. But I knew that the school yearbook needed photographers. The application process consisted of nothing more than asking “Can I help?” and I was hooked.
Q: What was the first medium or art form you found a passion for?
I was fascinated by my very first camera, a simple Brownie Starflash, which was a Christmas gift to me when I was 10. However, it wasn’t until I had access to a darkroom in college that I developed a passion for photography as an art form. I discovered that photography could go far beyond a simple realistic representation of the physical world. From that point forward, I passionately pushed the photographic envelope into areas of abstract color, multiple layering, surrealistic imagery and now printmaking — photo etching and polyester plate lithography.
Q: Have you always been in artist in the Denver area?
I started doing photography professionally in Illinois after graduating from college. I worked for a small studio, where I actually assisted in documentary film production. The studio had a contract with the Chicago Horticultural Society, and I’m sure that in a dark corner of a warehouse somewhere there’s a cult classic waiting to be rediscovered: “How to Mulch.”
Q: What is your favorite piece that you have done during your career?
My favorite piece is almost always the last one I did. But one distinctive highlight is actually a collection of 13 images called “Alpha & Omega – Images of the Apocalypse.” These are photographs combining traditional photographic images with abstract forms created by taping film to my darkroom walls, splashing chemicals on them, and then turning on the lights. I’m sure that OSHA would have been horrified. But the pictures were quite successful, so much so that the late Hal Gould gave me my first one-man show at his legendary Camera Obscura Gallery in Denver.
Q: What is one of the biggest challenges you face in your line of work?
I think the biggest challenge in my work is the one faced by most artists — earning money in order support the work. There are more people making more good photographs than ever before, thanks to the transition from film to digital.
Q: Tell us a random fact about yourself!
I’m a photographer, printmaker, filmmaker, writer, obsessive-compulsive reader, driver of a vintage sports car, builder of odd things, hater of wasted time, lover of Europe, drinker of Laphroaig.
Michael Rieger
style/technique: live etching/printmaking
Q: What was the first medium or art form you found a passion for and when?
I found my niche in 1990, but I started in photography at the age of 13. I hold a degree in ceramics and I love to draw in oil pastels. As the art director of the Denver Chalk Art Festival, I do street art too.
Q: What is your favorite piece that you have done during your career?
I love to create and take work from one medium to another; making a photo into an etching or carving it into a ceramic relief tile. One of the things I am most proud of is my historical photography work for FEMA at the World Trade Center site (9/11) and getting to tell that story of response and love.
Q: What is one of the biggest challenges you face in your line of work?
Always looking for the next project!
Q: Tell us a random fact about yourself!
A: Avid gardener and canner – I made 62 jars of bread and butter pickles this year.
Calvin Lee
style/technique: watercolor on paper, oil on canvas, chalk on paper
Q: When did you find your current niche as an artist?
Upon graduating high school in 1965, I wanted to go to photography school in California but my parents would not finance that pursuit, saying it was impractical. So, I enrolled in the school of architecture at the University of Arizona. The first semester I got a D in art and a C in introduction to architecture. Deciding I had no talent, I became a lawyer. In the year 2000, a client in Carbondale, Colo., was a gallery owner and owed me a lot of money. One day I said, “How about framing some of my pieces and I will take it off your bill.” Several months later he was asked to supply art in Park City for the Winter Olympics and said he was taking some of my pieces. Later another gallery owner said she did not carry works on paper but liked my work and if I ever did anything with oil on canvas to come back. I bought oils and canvas and my career went on from there.
Q: Have you always been an artist in the Denver area?
I got my start in Carbondale, Colo., but I moved to Denver four years ago and now have a studio in the RiNo District.
Q: What is your favorite piece that you have done during your career?
"Yukiguni - Snow Country"
Q: What do you love about what you do?
Why only recreate when you can also create?
Q: What is one of the biggest challenges you face in your line of work?
Following my favorite art quote: “There is no excellent beauty without some strangeness in its proportion.”
Sara Bowersock
style/medium: acrylics, spray paint and stencils – pop-infused/street-inspired art
Q: When did you find your current niche as an artist?
I think it started in college when I started experimenting with acrylic, spray paint and stencils. I was really into artists like Banksy and Shepard Fairey, later Ralph Steadman; Andy Warhol (pretty obviously) had a huge impact in influencing my direction.
Q: What was the first medium or art form that you found a passion for?
Probably colored pencil. It wasn’t until college I started messing with acrylics and spray paint. Painting classes never worked into my schedule, so I started experimenting at home, and that’s been my primary medium ever since.
Q: Have you always been an artist in the Denver area?
I started in Tulsa, Okla. I moved to Denver five years ago when I got married and have been slowly working my way into the Denver art scene. (Thanks to Black Shirt Brewery for helping me with that!)
Q: What is your favorite piece that you have done during your career?
I think one of my all-time favorite pieces is the portrait I did of Charles Bukowski. I love bringing out the soul of a person; capturing their character through color, texture and style.
Q: What is one of the biggest challenges you face in your line of work?
Getting the bills paid? Haha actually, probably just staying focused on what I’m doing, or trying to do and not getting too wrapped up in comparing myself to others and wishing I could do what they do. I think that is a huge challenge for me!
Q: Tell us a random fact about yourself!
I was born with two thumbs on my left hand! It’s not there anymore but the remaining thumb has missing joints so I can do crazy things with it! Also, I’m a crazy cat lady.