When we went looking for the most talented people
around, we expected to find them seated firmly
in the fine arts, a bunch of paintbrushes in one
hand, a conductor s baton in the other.
We thought they would be scribbling the
great American novel or carefully crafting a
couplet or two.
But as the search for a sampling of extraordinary
aptitude went on, we quickly realized
there is a lot of perfectly good talent out there that
is being taken for granted.
It s lurking under the cover of a to-go coffee cup,
pouring from the taps in a museum restroom and
thumping in the chest of a tiny baby.Wetasted it in a
little dessert no wider across than a silver dollar, and
recognized it in a traffic cone stuffed with butterscotch
candy.
We saw it in the type of intuition that
heals and the sort of creativity that sees
a winter coat in a down comforter. We discovered
it breathing new life into an ancient
decorative art.
Talent around us is impulsive and responsive,
creative and colorful, and we found it where we least
expected.
Jim Green
Do you hear what Jim Green hears?
A round of “Row, Row, Row, Your Boat” gushing from the bathroom sinks at the Denver Art Museum? Snickers and guffaws rising from the steps of a Denver Convention Center escalator? Frogs singing in grates along Curtis Street?
“I take what’s in the environment already and change it just a little,” says Green, a home-grown sound-installation artist of national renown.
The work gets people talking, and that’s part of the artistic intent, he says. “It breaks down some of the feelings of separation in public spaces. ”
The sounds can also sooth. In the airport in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Green replaced the jarring industrial buzzers used to signal the arrival of luggage with Latin music.
The installation extends into a nearby vestibule, where a voice hands out complements like candy. “I like your shoes,” the voice might murmur as you pass through.
Green started his artistic life as a sculptor at the University of Colorado, but switched mediums one summer when he discovered beauty in the sound of stories told by his hard-bitten neighbor from Duluth, Minn. He went on to collect sound portraits of midway workers and circus freaks.
From there his work evolved into sound installations triggered by the presence of humans.
Green, 56, now lives in downtown Denver, a few blocks from Soundwalk, one of his best-known installations. Occasionally, he’ll be walking along Curtis Street, his mind elsewhere, and find himself bewildered by swamp sounds coming up from the pavement.
“I’ll walk over it and surprise myself,” he says.
– Dana Coffield
Jon Gates
On busy Friday mornings at Lucia’s Casa de Caf , Jon Gates is a crazed conductor directing a hissing, burbling symphony of caffeine and steam.
From behind the hulking Rancilio espresso machine, he pays attention to a million different things. He keeps a bean on a line of customers calling out orders for caf latte and cappuccino, macchiato and mocha. At once, he’s grinding and frothing, and minding the time it takes to pull a shot and whether the machine’s temperature is just so.
But for the moment that it takes to join steamed milk with espresso, 33-year-old Gates gives each customer a solo performance.
Hot milk, steamed to silky perfection and swirled in a deep stainless steel pitcher, is poured gently into a dark pool of espresso. As the foam begins to rise above the lip in a low dome, Gates flicks his wrist to coax a creamy brown heart, or leaf or rosette from the brew, spilling a tiny bit of milk down the side of the cup, in the Italian way.
It may not be high art, but an art it is, and one that will not sacrifice function for form.
“What comes first is the coffee tasting right, before the art,” he says.
Gates has been honing his coffeecraft for 15 years, first in Lincoln, Neb., and later at the elbow of a Tattered Cover Book Store barrista who knew how to form a rosette in the foam. He improved his skill at St. Mark’s Coffeehouse, where he learned the most traditional pour – a curvy heart in latte foam – from owner Eric Alstad.
Two years ago, he moved to Lucia’s and started to practice more intricate designs, including a black heart floating in the golden crema of a cafe Americano. When he began to manage that feat, he thought he ought to take a picture. After all, most mornings, he’s the only one staring into the maw of the coffee cup.
“Most people get to-go cups with a lid, so they don’t even realize they’re getting art,” he says.
– Dana Coffield
Krongjit Chatuparisoot Zischke
Krongjit Chatuparisoot Zischke gets a little thrill from the produce department.
Squash and pumpkins, carrots and pears, radishes and bell peppers of every hue call to her from their bins. In mangos and melons blushing behind knobby skins and ruby-red beets with their grubby roots still attached, she sees wide-open flowers and spring buds ready to burst.
“It is an exciting moment,” says Zischke, who practices the 700-year-old Thai decorative art of carving floral sculpture from fruits and vegetables.
In the way a painter sees color filling a white canvas, Zischke says she sees the color of her sculpture from the inside of the fruit out.
The fragrant pink flesh of a small watermelon peeks out through fine tendrils of pith and skin to create a bouquet of roses. A chrysanthemum emerges from a cantaloupe.
She learned the delicate technique of using tiny sharp tools to coax forms from food when she was an artistically inclined 10-year-old in Thailand. Her parents took her for instruction by a master chef and artist who worked creating elegant masterpieces to decorate the Thai Royal dining table.
Zischke, who is called Kacie by her American friends, carved until 1993, when she came to the U.S. for a master’s of business administration. A degree in hand, she left the art behind for work marketing pay-per-view movies for a cable company.
In 1998, the man who would become her husband proposed both marriage and a business venture, importing crafts and cooking tools made by village cooperatives in rural Thailand.
From there, Zischke returned to the culinary arts, teaching Thai cooking and launching Boulder-based DeRoyale, a company that creates new world tablescapes from the ancient method.
The results often surprise even the people who help with the planning. “That’s part of my happiness,” Zischke says, “to make normal, simple nature into artistic work.”
– Dana Coffield
Klaus Obermeyer
Klaus Obermeyer is a doodler and a dreamer. Even at breakfast.
“You see, it’s a top hat and a bird feeder,” the ski- gear guru says of his latest invention, plans drafted on the back of a coffee-stained diner receipt.
He’s been like this for a long, long time.
Since 1947, the year he set up camp in Aspen, Obermeyer has been inspired to create. Today, the monarch of the Sport Obermeyer empire can be credited with a long list of “firsts” that revolutionized skiing.
“It was easy to come up with ideas in 1947 because there wasn’t much here,” says the 85-year-old, who skis every day of the season and likely holds the record for the most vertical feet skied at Aspen Mountain. He’s skied that hill all of its 58 seasons, each season more than 100 days, each day at least five runs for close to 100 million vertical feet.
All that time screaming through Spar Gulch has given him more than enough inspiration to dream up inventions.
He started with a down comforter made for him by his mother when he left Germany. With a few strategic stitches, that comforter became the country’s first down parka and launched Obermeyer’s long journey as a pioneer.
He made the first double ski boot; the first turtleneck; the first mirrored sunglasses; the first sunblock for high altitudes; the first nylon windshirts; the first side-zip pants; the first double lens ski goggle; the first two- pronged ski brake, which ended the dangerous leashes that lashed skis to rider’s legs; the first waterproof, breathable fabrics.
A quest to keep the few customers who paid his ski-instructor salary coming back for more lessons became an international dynasty.
“All we tried to do was make little things that made the sport better,” he says. “It was an exciting time. The future is just as fantastic. Opportunities are there waiting for us. We just need to see them.”
– Jason Blevins
Mark Plaatjes
Athletes who have had their physical pains soothed by Mark Plaatjes claim they would walk barefoot across hot coals if he said it would heal them.
He is that good. That perceptive. That reliable.
The 44-year-old marathoner turned physical therapist turned retailer is as intuitive about the aches of elite athletes as the pains that hobble a hobby runner.
He is formally educated but he really learned by doing in the years he trained as a long-distance runner.
“When you’re competing or doing an activity on a daily basis, or even two times a day, you tend to be very inside your body. You’re very aware of how your muscles feel, aware of your knees and your joints,” says Plaatjes, who won the World Track and Field Championship marathon gold in 1993.
Sometimes Plaatjes’ hands can see what his patients cannot describe. “I don’t know how I developed it, but I do get a feeling for what something is when I listen to somebody talk. The hands confirm it.”
Plaatjes fixes with manipulation, and helps heal with calisthenics designed to correct stride and posture and build strength against future injury.
Sometimes, the fix is in the shoe. When Plaatjes was first working as a physical therapist, he found himself “prescribing” certain types of running shoes to his clients. Often they’d come back in pain, the wrong shoe to blame.
Frustrated, he and another South African runner, Johnny Halberstadt, launched Boulder Running Co. They now have three stores, where every athlete is put on a treadmill and given a gait analysis before they’re allowed to buy a shoe.
The goal of the physical therapy practice and the shops is pain-free running.
“I see Olympic gold medalists, I see a person who is just running 12-minute miles,” he says. “When it comes down to it, the mechanics of the feet, knees and hips are the same, whether you’re an elite athlete or not.”
– Dana Coffield
Francois Lacour-Gayet
If Dr. Francois Lacour-Gayet were not a pediatric heart surgeon, he probably would be an architect: “What we do is three-dimensional construction, using the heart of a child and a lot of technology to achieve it.”
The 55-year-old doctor rebuilds kids’ hearts, repairing birth defects that range from displaced arteries to leaking valves to missing ventricles.
It all sounds rather mechanical, akin to fixing a carburetor, until you realize the patients are just as complicated and far more precious. Many of the 200 operations he performs each year are on newborns, whose hearts can be as small as golf balls.
“There is not much space for a mistake, you know?” he allows. “And the tissue is very fragile.”
As chief of cardiac surgery at The Children’s Hospital in Denver, Lacour-Gayet is renowned for having pioneered several advanced techniques and invented a system for rating the level of complexity of such procedures.
But it is his artistry – the ingenuity of his remedies, the gentleness of his stitchery – that most impresses his colleagues.
“You have to be very creative to fix these hearts, to redirect the blood flow when you don’t have normal chambers,” says cardiologist Dr. Dunbar Ivy, who diagnoses the problems that Lacour-Gayet solves. “It is an elegant challenge.”
Lacour-Gayet, who trained and practiced for 25 years in Paris, had long wanted to live in the United States when he agreed to come to Colorado in 2002, lured by the prospect of leading a top-notch program in a brand- new hospital. (Children’s will move into new quarters at Fitzsimons in two years.)
He has devoted his career to surgery on children rather than adults because, quite simply, he says the work is more interesting.
“You have a very wide spectrum of abnormalities, so there are a large number of operations you can do,” he says. “We have 150 different procedures, and each case is special. It’s more fun, you know?”
– Jack Cox
Yasmin Lozada-Hissom
Growing up in Peru, Yasmin Lozada-Hissom loved to watch her grandmother in the kitchen. “She’s an angel with her hands. For her, every meal is a feast, a way of showing love,” says the 37-year-old pastry chef, who now makes elegant desserts that exude the same sense of passion and celebration she experienced as a girl.
Lozada-Hissom won raves in New York before settling six years ago in metro Denver, where she works for Udi’s, the Adams County sandwich baron. She is lauded for her dense and dreamy carrot cakes, and for fresh-fruit tarts boasting berries as carefully arranged as a rack of billiard balls.
But her piece de resistance is a powdery-soft chocolate mousse cake made with a hint of Grand Marnier liqueur and a healthy dose of cocoa from Venezuela, her native country. One admirer calls it positively rapturous.
“For me, balance and harmony are extremely important – in flavors and textures and colors,” Lozada-Hissom says. “I don’t want to overwhelm any ingredient with sugar. I like it clean and simple.”
The chef, who graduated from college in Caracas with a degree in Latin American literature, got interested in the culinary arts while living in France and Italy in her 20s.
She trained in Paris under Chef Francoise Meunier, and in New York under “the very talented” Gary Robins and Tina Casaceli, among others, before landing a job at a then-unknown Soho eatery named Quilty’s, where her skills with sweets helped launch it into the big time.
“New York City’s hardened, seen-it- all restaurant critics were very generous with me,” she says modestly.
Today, whipping up concoctions in a room chilled to 68 degrees so the buttery pastry doughs remain flaky, she is already dreaming of the sorbets and melon soups she plans for summer – assuming she can obtain such “explosions of flavor” as guanabana fruit.
“The essence,” she says, “is always to use the very best ingredients.”
– Jack Cox
Yumi Janairo Roth
Traffic cones turned into pinatas. Police barricades tiled in disco-style mirrors. Concrete barriers wrapped in hand-sewn “cozies.” Shipping pallets inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
Yumi Janairo Roth, a 35-year- old art professor at the University of Colorado, finds inspiration in the most mundane objects, which she spends hours embellishing in ways that both twist and tease people’s perceptions.
“When you ‘pin~ata-ize’ a traffic cone (by decorating it with orange crepe paper and filling it with candy),” she says, “it challenges you to do the very thing you’re not supposed to do” – which is run into it with a car.
Similarly, when you decorate a barricade, it raises the question: Does a symbol of security and control lose its authority when its appearance is changed?
“I’m always attracted to the thing we take for granted, that’s in our peripheral vision, that we interact with all the time, yet escapes our notice,” Roth explains.
“But what I focus on is the cultural implications of the object, not just making it into a pretty thing.”
Thus, her current project – adorning a mahogany pallet in a style reminiscent of the Filipino furniture she saw as a child in the home of her maternal grandparents – is calling attention to the way in which “information travels back and forth between cultures.”
Roth, who grew up in Chicago and Reston, Va., studied anthropology at Tufts University in Boston before concentrating on art in graduate school. Prior to joining the CU faculty in 2002, she taught at a small liberal-arts college in Wisconsin, where she shopped for both ideas and materials at the local Home Depot.
An expert metalsmith, she is known for a dedication to detail that makes her work labor-intensive. But that doesn’t mean the pallet she’s working on now will be safely attached to a wall when it goes on display at the Bowen gallery in Brooklyn in November.
Says Roth, “I think I’ll keep it on the ground, where it belongs.”
– Jack Cox
