If you follow my putrid personal Instagram, you’re a member of the super duper secret [shhh, I’m serious] society that I’m bombarding with images related to my current exploits at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass, Colorado.
Specifically, I’m taking a workshop to learn watercolor monoprint plus Rubylith and photopolymer plates. [It’s almost like a global pandemic kept me from building a few skill sets in undergrad. And yes, I will do my due diligence to find everybody’s Instagram handles and start tagging them. Later. Studio today].
Why then no finished art pictures and just an endless string of messy-haired, unwashed, mountain-adjacent selfies? For one thing, my pride wants to wait until I have some thoroughly fermented work before slapping it up on my internet corkboards. But also, awe is a difficult to manage emotion that sometimes finds its only productive manifestation in a flurry of internet photo vomit. As your friendly neighborhood east coast curmudgeon, I’m taking this digital minute to own up to, in words not just selfies, how thoroughly out of my depth I am in this landscape.
Physical symptoms have to be acknowledged. Silly me was in the dark about the fact that my rebellious flesh vessel doesn’t instantly acclimate to being over 9,000 feet above sea level. We spent two days doing a lovely migraine riddled dance together involving blood-snot and unnecessarily assertive joints. Drink water, kiddos.
But that aside, this is a confession of the trail exploring I’ve wasted precious studio energy [and oxygen] on. This mountain is an utterly prehistoric tree riddled mass. It’s not sleeping. It’s watching. I am a creature of the wrong scale to be fooling around in this red-dirt, rock pile thrusting me into the sky. To be comfortable, to graduate from my intruder status, I would need to be:
1. A lizard
2. The scale of multiple houses
Snowmass is pre-human, post-human, anti-human, and waiting for the puny, meaty bipeds to finally wither on its face, hopefully to be replaced by more worthy life forms.
Oh, and the ranch is brilliant.
Anyway, I love it. Here’s some selfies.
Susanna F. Barger 