The big, life-shaking jolt happened about 22 years ago, when Denver artist Darrell Anderson quit his job as a steward for Frontier Airlines and determined to make a living, somehow, as an artist.
The jolt spawned aftershocks over the years, as Anderson, 57, toiled to paint for rent, to paint for food and gasoline and, later, for a mortgage.
And now the Five Points native is dealing with the aftershocks of another, albeit less dramatic, jolt.
He’s gone abstract.
He’s gone from painting trumpet players and dancers to triangles and amoebas with lines going through them and broad arcs of color.
And he’s hoping he can accept the invitation by the muckety-mucks at the prestigious Florence Biennale of Contemporary Art. They want Anderson to travel to Italy in December and show his stuff at the event. First, though, Anderson needs the money to get there.
He’s been doing a lot of painting.
The abstract works “have become a language of my soul,” says Anderson, a tall, lanky man with a thick, drooping mustache, during lunch at Bogey’s, the clubhouse restaurant at the City Park Golf Course. “They are less representational. There is a small amount of fear involved because those who collect my work will see I have changed, and I will be judged. But I have learned in this business, if you take care of your soul, your soul will take care of you.”
Assuming Anderson’s dictum contains some truth, then the man has done some serious soul tending.
He grew up poor in Five Points, served in the Army during the Vietnam War, took a job at Frontier Airlines as a flight steward and limped along until the age of 35, when he looked back at his life and found it confusing, and without purpose. He examined his current state and found it lacked meaning.
For how long, he asked himself, can I just blur through life?
The answer: no longer.
That’s when he left Frontier Airlines and struck out on his own, armed with little more than paintbrush and personality. He’d always been good at drawing, and had long dreamed of spending his days messing with color and shape, rather than distributing pretzels and smiling buh-byes to plane-loads of coffee-sour passengers.
Nearly 25 years later, he’s still at his easel most days. He’s worked odd jobs off and on to help inflate the bank account, but his income, for the most part, has come from his art.
Some artists have trust funds or wealthy spouses to pay the bills. Others grow up in a cocoon of encouragement and patronage, an environment that helps transform dreams and talents into realities. Anderson’s success, however, hinged mostly on his own initiative.
Blessed to create
Becoming an artist “wasn’t something people in my neighborhood grew up with,” he says.
“I’m blessed, I’m lucky. To create things. To make a statement. And to make a living,” he says on another day, in the garage of his Park Hill ranch house. This is where he makes art, among a mishmash of paintings and brushes and standard-issue garage ephemera – a purple bicycling helmet, milk cartons filled with things, extension cords, gardening tools. Here, Anderson spends hours standing on a rug and staring at the canvas on the easel, listening to jazz, talking to himself, singing.
Anderson did not graduate from an art college. He didn’t spend his youth studying his craft with different masters. Anderson never could get into galleries, he says.
He just painted, and got involved with the community. He’d attend chamber of commerce after-work events, and paint attendees. Sometimes, they would buy a painting. Sale or not, the businesspeople would chat with Anderson, who would tell them: “I’m going to teach you that you deserve art in your life.”
Soon, the referral network began humming, and people started paying him for portraits and landscapes and anything else they thought might look good behind a couch or above a kitchen table.
He attended art shows and sold his work. Events – big golf matches, for example – commissioned him to do the artwork for posters. He has traveled the world, working on art projects.
He joined as many philanthropic organizations as he could handle and met a lot of important people. Over time, these connections helped him land big public art projects, most notably a series of mosaics set in floors at each end of the A concourse at Denver International Airport.
“He is committed to the community, committed to the arts, and whenever there is anything going on in the arts community, he is there, he has a presence there, and he contributes,” says Denver Art Museum director Lewis Sharp. “He touches so many aspects of the cultural life of this community, and he has worked in such a positive way with school kids on large art projects, to decorate construction barriers and things like that, all of them very creative.
“He has made the city more attractive. The important thing, though, was getting the kids involved. He really lets them develop their artistic talents and interests.”
A mentor, teacher, role model
Anderson married for the first time when he was 49. He doesn’t have children of his own. But he’s dedicated himself to kids through many art projects. And along the way he has served as mentor, teacher and role model to a handful of aspring artists.
“To be honest, the confidence I have comes from Darrell. You have to believe in someone,” says Michael Gadlin, one of the men Anderson watched over and taught. “The only reason I’m in this business is because I told him all I want to do is absorb myself in this business and see if I can do it, and he said, don’t worry, you will.
“He gave one-quarter of his studio space to (Jay Paul Apodaca, another artist Anderson tutored) and me on Blake Street,” Gadlin says. “We set up our studio, and we knew then we were going to be professional artists.”
Gadlin, who won Best of Show at the Cherry Creek Art Show in 1999, says Anderson’s help stretched far beyond the application of brush to canvas. He taught Gadlin to understand the business side of his art, something Gadlin did not learn much about in art school but which is important.
“He put in me the belief that you can do this for a living, and it’s not just something you have to struggle with,” says Gadlin, who makes abstract mixed-media art full time. “It’s more than just painting in the basement and not ever showing what you’ve got. He’s all about showing what you’ve got. Sharing.”
And now, if he raises the $30,000 or $40,000 he needs to ship himself and his paintings to Florence and to stay for about three weeks, Anderson will be sharing with his largest audience ever: an international throng of art lovers who will be witness to his first foray into abstract art.
The series of 12 paintings wrestle with deep emotional and spiritual issues that Anderson found swirling around inside himself when he stopped painting things that he saw, and instead started painting things he felt.
“I wanted to know how to paint you. The love started there,” he says. And now that he’s turned inside for inspiration, he says, “the risks are just beginning.”
Staff Writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
You think you’ve seen it before? Maybe you have. Some of Darrell Anderson’s work is in highly visible locations:
Land of the Floors
Twenty figures, each composed from 9,216 1-inch tiles, cover 16,000 square feet of the A concourse at Denver International Airport.
RTD Handicap Stations Mosaics
Five 10-foot-long mosaics grace the handicap ramps on the RTD Light Rail stations on Welton Street in Five Points.
Paths to Music
Located in the music library at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, the huge mosaic represents students who attended the college when the work was created.
5-4-3-2-1
Anderson created a 6-by-12-foot glass-and-metal mosaic commissioned by the Association of Air Force Missileers, which is installed in an atrium of the Air Force Space Command headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs.
Curtis Park Community Center
This summer, Anderson collaborated with kids from the Curtis Park and Five Points neighborhoods to create a painted mural that runs the length of an interior hallway at the Curtis Park Community Center.
