Gritty, soulful guitar slinger/songwriter Tony Rosario is the opening act for the KOTO concert at Telluride's Sheridan Opera House, featuring The John Cowan Band. His hard-hitting acoustic band is Trutone & The Pour Boyz.Tony’s claim to fame includes stints with seminal rock group Firefall,...
[click "Play" button to hear Susan's conversation with John Cowan]John Cowan was only 21 when he joined Telluride Bluegrass Festival sensation, New Grass Revival, which also featured the redoubtable talents of Sam Bush, Bela Fleck and Pat Flynn. For...
[click "Play" button to hear Susan's conversation with Susan McCormick]
Susan McCormick at Telluride's Stronghouse Studios:
Susan McCormick is a longtime local who generally maintains a low profile around town. March 5 will different. It will be Susan's once a year day, when her latest paintings go on display at the Stronghouse Studios, 283 South Fir Street, part of the monthly First Thursday Art Walk.
Susan arrived in town in 1979. Husband Brian works at the water and waste water plant and skis "about one million vertical feet" on the mountain year after year. Susan, a non-skier, lives for the summer festival season and the music, especially Bluegrass. Over the years, like so many locals, she worked a number of jobs: ski 
area ticket office, Resort Rentals (now ResortQuest) and as realtor T.D. Smith's assistant. For the past seven years, she has collected her paycheck from Jack Wesson and Ben Jackson, owners of Telluride Realty.
The past four years, Susan has also served as a board member on the Telluride Council for the Arts and Humanities, the non-profit voice of the local art scene and sponsor of Art Walk.
Susan began painting as a young girl, inspired by a talented aunt. Today, she works in watercolor and oil to capture the beauty of the Telluride region. She also paints florals and abstractions. What links the disparate themes is a passion for exploring color in seamless and surprising combinations.
[click "Play" button to hear Susan's conversation with Dr. Jeff Ptak]
TIO' s next Doer, #464, Dr. Jeff Ptak would never be described as existentially fraught. The man clearly loves his life, laughs easily, and wears his success as lightly as a bespoke suit. Lucky for us this highly accomplished, self-deprecating guy with a furrowed brow and an exaggerated sense of irony also has experience – over 20 years in practice – and talent to burn.
Dr. Ptak regularly swaps several hats: husband, father, skier, and doctor.The one he wears to work is bifurcated: Jeff is the Telluride Medical Center’s dermatologist, charged with translating for patients the jabberwocky of sun blocks and sun screens – do you know the difference? – benign squamous cells and deadly melanomas. He is also Telluride’s new plastic surgeon.
Dr. Jeff Ptak wears two hats in the Telluride community: he is a board certified plastic surgeon with a private practice and the dermatologist at the Telluride Medical Center. In both contexts, however, he regularly confronts the vicissitudes of altitude and aging on skin and finds solutions.
Dr. Ptak first visited the Telluride region 40 years ago. Since then, he has watched the community grow and change, and the town's small "clinic" grow into a Medical Center now bursting at the seams, just as the demand to deliver more and better state-of-the-art services is growing.
Leonardo da Vinci, an influence, had the Mona Lisa, and Roger Mason has the New Sheridan, his muse, and its setting, the town of Telluride. The New York-based painter has merged with the hotelscapes and townscapes he paints over and over again. Main Street is his local studio, where the artist stands determined to capture the fickle light as it hits our buildings, lamp posts, cars, street life, and mountains.
Roger has generously donated two posters enhanced with paint, one of his "muse," another a town scene, to Kate Wadley's FEAST, Fund for Expanding and Supporting Telluride's Medical Center.
To understand what Roger is up to in his work, it helps to understand his influences.
Best of luck on this Big Weekend to Telluride AIDS Benefit key players: TAB boardmember/AIDS activist Ron Gilmer, TAB boardchair Jodie Shike Wright of ONE Architects and fashion show director/New York director Shawn Rozsa.(Jen Koskinen photo) ...
For Telluride AIDS Benefit supporters, this is the Big Weekend, the culmination of the efforts of a small army of activists determined to raise the bar on prevention through awareness and to help those affected and infected by the seemingly irrepressible pandemic.
Twenty-five years ago, since a faceless, nameless virus was announced in this country,
AIDS victims and their families have flocked like moths to flames of hope – a miracle cure whispered here, a sudden recovery talked about there. The pot of gold everyone is seeking at the end of the rainbow is a vaccine – but so far, nada: AIDS has resisted medications through mutation.
Although the number of AIDS-related deaths has tumbled since the advent of a more potent class of HIV drugs in the mid-90s, the rate of new infections in the U.S. has remained unchanged: about 53,000 – 55,000 cases a year.
The Children's Hospital Immunodeficiency Program inside the Denver Children's Hospital began attending to the medical needs of HIV-infected children in 1991, only three short years before TAB got off the ground. Now in its 18th year, CHIP has grown into multi-disciplinary program serving infected parents,...
Auction, Friday, noon – 9 p.m., Telluride's Sheridan Opera House
(Check out the slide show below: Jen Koskinen's photo from 2008 auction and a sample of the art to be auctioned.)
The virus was announced in Washington, D.C. in April 1984. As quickly as the pandemic spread, AIDS threaded itself into the fabric of our lives. It also became an insistent muse for artists of every stripe.
Art about AIDS or art in support of AIDS causes is as varied as its many creators, but it always springs from a very personal place. Whatever form it takes, it is always a victory for the transformative powers of the imagination: It can turn devastation into beauty or shine a light on dark things repressed in society or in our psyches, things everyone wants to run away from.
