Like so many who didn’t have the good fortune to have been born in Colorado, pastel artist Sandy Guinn is a firmly transplanted Coloradan. “I’m from Iowa, but I’ve been out here for 40 years, so I feel like a semi-native,” says Guinn.
Guinn is on the faculty of the Community College of Denver, where she teaches 2-D Design, Drawing 2 (drawing with color), murals and figure drawing. She teaches pastels in one project in Drawing 2. She says she isn’t sure why pastels are not a popular medium. “It’s an ancient medium so it has history. Most schools will offer a watercolor or pastel class once every two or three years as a specialty class, but I don’t know of any college in the Denver Metro area that run those classes on a regular basis.”
Guinn loves the images of farm animals in her kitchen. She also loves drawing on furniture. “I painted a large rooster on my kitchen table. I then sanded and roughed up the chairs to give them an aged look and painted each one a different vibrant color, each of which are also found in the rooster. My kitchen table came from my sister’s house; she died of cancer a few years ago, so the rooster in a way gives tribute to her—she always had a country kitchen theme.”
Guinn’s art is not limited to just one genre. “I do some surrealism. which to me is drawing your emotions. It can be nonsensical, but you’re drawing from your heart and you’re trying to work out your feelings. I still do a lot of that, but I really got interested in drawing animals and people in the last eight years.
“When I started teaching figure drawing, I thought faces were fascinating—you know, the different expressions on people’s faces and how you can kind of look into their soul.” Then she decided to make portraiture more fuBy painting children making funny faces. And now she’s painting animals that make funny faces.
“I like to draw big—22” by 30” is generally what I do. I find that pastels are so chunky and big, I have a hard time drawing small. It’s a struggle for me, and I find that if I can blow things up I do much better. Also, I’m very active when I draw—my whole arm is moving. I’m a gestural drawer, an energetic drawer and drawing tiny constrains me.”
A while back, she set a goal to draw every animal that’s going extinct. “But then I found out there’s like 500 of them. It just really depressed me, actually. I went about getting started doing that, but I realized that I’m never gonna get to draw them all.”
Guinn says the only writing she’s done is a sketchbook for her students. “My students were continually turning in empty sketch pads. Part of their grade is they need to keep a sketch pad and sketch at least five times a week. But at the end of the semester they’d turn in mostly empty sketch pads and their comment to me was, ‘I couldn’t think of anything to draw.’” Her sketchbook contains sections on the fear of drawing, on perspective. “And there’s a section on training your eye to see like an artist sees.
“The last part of the sketch pads is blank pages with a little drawing in the corner of a frog or a dog or a vase, and they’re supposed to draw those objects. They don’t have to come up with an idea to draw. It’s already done for them. Now, I have a lot more success with sketch pads being turned in.”
Guinn grew up in the small farm town of Perry, Iowa, 45 miles northwest of Des Moines. “I’ve lived here more than I ever lived in Iowa,” Guinn said. In college, she married an attorney who wanted to live in Colorado. “He took the bar in Colorado and passed it and wanted me to move out here with him.” The daughter of a Methodist minister, she told him, “I’m not going to move anywhere until we’re married, so we got married and moved to Colorado when we were 25. We lived in Evergreen for 25 years. Then we got divorced and I moved down here, to Wheat Ridge.
“I think most artists are their worst critics. We’re harder on ourselves than anybody else and I’m no exception to that. I’m constantly seeking acceptance. I’m still insecure about my art. I guess that might surprise some people because I teach, and I think I come across as somebody who’s pretty sure of herself, but inside I’m still a 14-year-old girl who’s trying to draw out her emotions.
“I always try to have my work touch somebody, provoke a memory, or a wish, or it just touches them in some way that they want to hang it on their wall, you know? I think that’s when art is effective, is when somebody makes a connection with it.”
Perhaps yearning for a part of her life back in Perry, Iowa, Guinn found a home in a part of Wheat Ridge that still maintains the charm of the old farming community. Guinn is not afraid to use vivid colors—not only in her paintings but in both the interior and exterior of her house. Her home is a reflection of her soul.
Guinn says her passion is painting with pastels. She will retire from teaching next year and plans to devote her time to that passion. Check out her website: SandyGuinn.com.
