Maxfield Parrish Skies

In my line of work, I have stayed in some very nice hotels. While I usually take the opportunity to appreciate the lovely surroundings I rarely pay much attention to the artwork that graces the walls. I like art well enough, but I'm more concerned with  the details of how to make my unadorned meeting room attractive and functional. I leave the ambiance of lobbies and guest rooms to the hotel.

Not having studied art, it is no surprise that when I first ran a meeting at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs and was assigned space in the Maxfield Parrish room I wondered who he was to get a room named after him. The answer I received was that he was an artist who was a friend of the hotel’s original owner. Call me unobservant but I made no connection between the merchandise in the gift shop on which there was embossed a richly colored depiction of the Broadmoor with a lake in front of it and the name Maxfield Parrish. Nor did I connect the name to the numerous paintings of sprites in pastoral settings with the same brilliant blue skies, peach tinted clouds and mossy green trees I’d seen in art books growing up.

Nonetheless, whenever I’m at the Broadmoor, I take a few moments in the quiet hours of dawn to stand at my hotel room window taking in the last serenity I will know before taking my clip board and cell phone to the clanging, fluorescent lit back hallways and clinking, clunking ballrooms where breakfast is being set out. Even in those few blessed minutes of peace looking out at the lake with the mountains rising behind the resort, the morning air shimmering in pink, and the grey sky transforming to lapis, I never made the connection between that view and a work of art, much less with the artist.

I obviously got the point that sunrise was beautiful and serene, even otherworldly, but nope, I did not think of Maxfield Parrish until one year when Salt drove down to spend an evening with me. As usual, I was busy with some type of tangled problem that had to be resolved before morning, so he was set adrift to wander the halls of the hotel. When I caught up with him for a late dinner, he had just torn himself away from a set of paintings he’d seen in a hallway. He asked if I knew who Maxfield Parrish was, and I said “Yes. There’s a meeting room named after him. He’s some friend of the former owner.” Salt kindly did not conclude I was an idiot, and showed me that my hotel key had a Maxfield Parrish painting printed on it. He had also just found some of Parrish’s paintings in the hotel. Salt was looking forward to more free time to look for more. Ahh. . . the connections were in place. Parrish’s famous – I know this now – depiction of the Broadmoor is very much like my early morning view, except the lake is in the wrong place, which I understand was Parrish’s artistic license.

 From then on Salt and I would point out Maxfield Parrish skies whenever we ran across them during our early morning commutes and as we sat watching the sun set over the foothills in our old home. These skies are not particularly common anywhere else I’ve lived and even at our old home they were a noteworthy occurrence.

This is how I know I am one of the most fortunate people in the world to live where I do now. I often tell people that although we have no view of the mountains from our new house, we have Colorado to the west with great, rustic ponderosas towering overhead and we have Kansas to the east where we can see thunderstorms fifty miles away over the plains. We also see rainbows after every storm, we enjoy the longest sunrises and we can see the glow of brilliant sunsets shining through the trees. Every day has at least one, if not more, Maxfield Parrish moment.

Looking out the window in the morning is a great treat for me and last weekend I opened my eyes at sunrise to see the a white gold light pushing its way over the horizon to the east of us. Through our west facing window I looked out at the burly ponderosas, which were catching a peach colored light that muted the deep forest green of the needles and lit their wide trunks dappled in burnt umber and charcoal. The sky behind them shone blue, but the gold cast to the very air was awe inspiring. There is something about this light that makes everything ordinary appear in a way that one has never seen it before; indeed I look at the sky, the ponderosas, the deer in the yard with the wonder of someone seeing these mysterious things for the first time.

There are many who call Maxfield Parrish’s pastoral settings “fantasy,” his androgynous figures “angelic,” and his skies “ethereal.”  I’m beginning to disagree, since I doubt I live in Maxfield Parrish's imagination. This is every day for me. 

http://www.parrishhousefoundation.org/index.html