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“He could draw really well,” Coen says of his father, the man he calls his “first critic.” If his mother’s permissive style encouraged the young Donald’s artistic talent, his father was the whetstone that sharpened it to a fine point. “I all the time and when I think back about it - I think it’s so amazing - not once did my mother say, ‘Donald, don’t draw on the table.’ Not once.” Just inside the front door, fat koi fish swim slowly in a man-made pond, a symbol of strength of purpose and perseverance in Japanese culture. It was to be, first and foremost, sun- and star-filled, an “intimate surprise” where the walls acted as sculpture and “nature as canvases.” A devout disciple of the gospel of hard work, Coen says he cut every stick of wood for this house, working side-by-side with a carpenter to build it.
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He gave an architect a 15-point list of parameters for the house. All three environments shaped Coen’s personality. He’s already given a tour of his house, a work of art in its own right that, by design, evokes the simultaneous sense of being inside a museum, a church and a farmhouse. “The table was real smooth, so I could draw with a pencil and then I could bend the lines with my fingers,” Coen says, sitting at his kitchen table today. His work, particularly The Migrant Series, reminds us of that befuddling truth: The more important something is - the more fundamental it is to everyday life - the more easily it’s ignored.Ĭoen started drawing when he was 4 or 5, doodling on the family’s white enamel kitchen table. His art is large and all-consuming, like the Western skies he knows so well, with an expert treatment of light that draws the viewer ever closer, as though they could reach into the painting and touch the sleeve of its subject. ‘Miguel,’ art by Don CoenĬoen’s art - from the abstract, non-objective works that typified his early career to the large-scale Western landscape pieces that have come to define the later chapters of his catalog - explores the people, places and things we take for granted, whether that’s an abstract representation of a rainbow or a larger-than-life portrait of the people who pick the food we buy at the grocery store. He’s kept in touch with several of the people he photographed, and took road trips across hundreds of miles to hand deliver prints of his photos. He visited many of them several times, and got to know members of their families, sometimes purely by coincidence during other trips to photograph migrants at work. Over the course of nearly a decade, Coen traveled around Colorado and across the country - Florida, Texas, Washington, California, all by car - to photograph migrants at work in onion and strawberry fields, in orange groves and apple orchards.
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Everyone around him worked hard for everything they had, not least of all the migrant workers who came seasonally to pick crops on his family’s farm.Ĭoen’s respect for life on the farm has carried through his nearly seven-decade career as an artist, most recently in The Migrant Series, a collection of 15 larger-than-life airbrush portraits of traveling Latino farmworkers, now showing at Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA), guest curated by Ann Daley. Hard work wasn’t just a part of life for Coen, it was the meaning of life. “I didn’t know we were poor and nobody ever said we were poor,” he says of his childhood. “I think I had about as wonderful a childhood as anybody could have,” Coen says today from his home off Jay Road, a sun-filled gallery of art Coen has made or collected from friends over his 83 years on Earth. There was no running water or electricity, and the boys slept on the screened-in front porch, nestled snugly in a feather tick, the family cat curled around their feet for extra warmth. The boys’ parents bought their one-bedroom house during the Depression, before Don was born. Every morning once they were old enough, Coen and his brother got up and ground grain to feed the family’s 500 head of cattle, then they milked seven heifers before heading off to school. But on his journey he meets an old god, forgotten a long time ago, and the two learn to enjoy each other's company.Don Coen’s family had a farm just outside of Lamar, Colorado, southeast of Colorado Springs, about half an hour’s drive from the border of Kansas, out there where the sky stretches on forever in every direction. In a world where gods live just outside of the reach of mortals, a minor god named Stretch decided to travel, expand his previously small world and grow.