Sarah Haas, Gilpin County.  Virginia Unseld’s painting studio lies at the base of the three-story house her husband built in mid-Gilpin County. It has two different views so that, depending on your mood or the weather, you can pick which vista you’d like to look upon, one of the couple’s favorite post-retirement activities. On one side sits the massive rock faces of Golden Gate Park, surrounded by tree covered hills. On the other lies the coveted divide view.

The backdrop to many of her moments and thoughts, Virginia loves these vistas, but inspiring as they are, she doesn’t paint them because, after all, “it’s hard to make those better than what you see.”

Instead, Virginia prefers more intimate patches of landscape, a feat of finding the beautiful in the mundane, like a little clump of chamisa or a patch of light coming through an intersection on a dirt road.

When she works from inside her studio, Virginia is surrounded by her art, with at least 30 pieces hanging on the walls and hundreds, if not thousands, more tucked away on shelves and in sketchbooks. Each piece is boldly colored and meticulously composed to form an ode to the drama of light.

Altogether they create a pastel quilt of Virginia’s favorite western places.

As she reminds us however, her landscapes aren’t just about place, but of a place in a particular time She points to one of an adobe building, patterned with slices of light piercing through an aged awning.

“Just a year after I painted the awnings, they were gone,” Virginia says.

“And a similar thing happened here (she points to a second piece), and here (she points to a third).” It’s a reminder that moments are fleeting, that places as we know them are fleeting. Virginia’s work serves as a record of history.

“There are some landscape painters who document more intentionally, depicting endangered places like public lands that are being sold off to private entities,” she says with an air of regret. “I haven’t been specific like that, but maybe I should be, maybe I should go to lands that Trump is auctioning off and paint them like an artistic resistance. Maybe I should be more political with my landscapes.”

Surrounded by beautiful views and paintings of nature’s beautiful corners, Virginia worries about everything else that’s going on in the big, bad world. She wants to stay engaged with protecting the environments she paints and so she’s always striving to interweave the world out there with the world at the tip of her paintbrush.

Virginia does have some blatantly political art work, mostly in the form of collages and altered books. In one, “Simple,” she glued a book open to its first chapter’s title page that asks, “How would nuclear war begin?” Under the ominous question, Virginia inserted a doorbell, replete with a blatantly red button that’s satisfying to push. In a far-off corner of the book she wrote the word, “simple,” in thin pencil so it appears like an afterthought, one that’s dangerously easy to miss.

She’s political in other ways, too. Earlier in the day she called Senator Cory Gardner to express some concerns. She’s sat on nonprofit boards for 19 years, and, just last week, she met with Mountain Women Move Mountains, a meet up of local woman who support each other in staying engaged in these mountains that can sometimes feel so far away from the real world.

Seeing her sit in her studio, a building she funded with money she earned from her dual careers as an art teacher and an artist, one needn’t know anything else but that she’s a painter with a room of her own to declare her political. It’s a humble space, a 10 by 20 foot shed converted into a studio, but nonetheless it’s a feat worth noting.

In 1929 Virginia Wolf wrote about the importance of just such a place in her essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” arguing that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” which is to say, “to create art.” Ninety years ago her words were an exhortation to women to take up creative traditions that had been so hardly bequeathed to them. Today, her words land on the modern female artist like a responsibility, and a call to action.

Having spent more than 40 years as a female artist, it comes naturally and so by now might seem ordinary, but it’s worth taking a minute to credit Virginia Unseld with the political gusto it takes to be an artist. Looked at one way, her studio is a refuge from the world, seen in another, it is a choice to spend time inside of it a creator. Her paintings themselves are a testament to the courage of this daily act for lying in each detail, in the color she assigns to a poppy or the light she casts on a cluster of trees, is a reminder of all that is heroically mundane.

A weekly column about locals living along the Peak-to-Peak. To suggest someone for a profile please email Sarah at mountainfolktales@gmail.com.

(Originally published in the September 27, 2018, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)