Four of Colorado’s female leaders overcame various disadvantages

ON ASSIGNMENT for Colorado Expression magazine’s annual Women’s Issue, I interviewed a quartet of leaders who overcame adversity and obstacles to assume leadership roles. For the cover story, the magazine featured four Colorado women: a Black woman, two Latinas and an immigrant from Poland.

Oftentimes, the most interesting portions of interviews never get published. We shared some laughs and some tears, too, off the record. My feature appears in the new issue of Colorado Expression.

Daniel Sprick painted his own interiors during quarantine

Daniel Sprick did not let COVID-19 self-quarantine quell his creativity. Instead, he took work-at-home to new heights, painting a luminous series of interiors from his high-rise apartment in Denver. For Sprick, , self-quarantine was a time of new perspectives and an elevated awareness of the comforts of home.

When during some of the darkest days of the virus, Dan sent me images of his new paintings, I knew I wanted to write about the work. The publisher of Western Art & Architecture was immediately interested, and my feature titled “Captured Beauty” appears in the October/November issue of the magazine.

The artist spoke about skulls as subject matter, social justice issues and why his bedsheets hanging in his living room were depicted in one of his new paintings. And he spoke about his process:

“What I do consciously is composing and placing intervals and voids and objects in a harmonious, rhythmic way or with slightly irregular harmonies that I hope will evoke some feeling in the viewer. They don’t need to know why. If we’re not musicians, we don’t reverse- engineer songs to know how they’re causing us feelings. Either you feel something or you don’t,” said Sprick.

He worked with a limited palette of mostly earth tones — umbers and siennas and whites. White walls, Sprick explained, display the nature of the planet’s light and the human eye. 

 “There’s something that happens when you look at interiors with a blue sky, like today, the world inverts. The blue of the sky is at the bottom and the warmth of the earth—the green and brown—is coming up to the top of the wall. It’s how the light off the planet works. It inverts like a camera: The blue sky is above, but at the bottom of the room. The green or brown at the bottom bounces to the top.”

At the bottom of several paintings in the series, Sprick painstakingly painted the woodgrain of his apartment’s floors — an almost impossible feat. The paintings provide a look at the artist’s personal space, as well as a glimpse into Sprick’s head space during pandemic.