A crowd of friends, admirers and colleagues gather at the Loveland Museum to honor famous Loveland artist Hollis Williford, who passed away in 2007, at an event remembering his life and work Friday (Will Costello / Loveland Reporter Herald).
Friends, family and colleagues of Hollis Williford, the renowned Loveland artist who died in 2007, gathered in the Foote Gallery of the Loveland Museum Friday evening to celebrate his life and work.
Williford is most famous for his sculpting, which appears in the Benson Sculpture garden and in front of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, where his towering monument “Welcome Sundown,” a 12-foot tall bronze of a cowboy wiping his brow greets visitors.
But Williford was not limited to sculpture—his drawings, paintings and etchings inspired numerous other artists, and it was purchasing one such etching in an antique store in Denver in the 1990s that prompted Eric Grant, Williford’s eventual biographer and one of the featured speakers at Friday’s memorial event, to reach out to Williford in the first place.
“Eventually, I started asking myself ‘Who is this guy?’” Grant remembered at Friday’s event.
The man that Grant shared the stage with was Williford’s brother, Ronnie Williford, who flew from Florida, where he works as an artist, to attend the event.
Ronnie Williford spent his time at the podium sharing stories, some of which prompted nods and laughs of recognition among the gathered crowd.
One story he told was of an easel in his brother’s studio covered in scraps of paper.
“It was covered in little graphite and ink thumbnail sketches,” Williford said. “Any time an idea would come to him or he’d see something he’d scratch that out and pin it on the wall.”
Also pinned up were quotes from various artists and literary figures, perhaps 200 hundred, some whimsical, and others more profound.
“The biggest one I remember, the largest, said ‘It’s just paint, stupid. Let it speak for itself,’” he said. Others from Pablo Picasso, Jack London and Deepak Chopra he also remembers years later.
The event Friday was in part prompted by the donation of a number of Hollis Williford’s pieces to the Loveland Museum by a prolific collector of Williford’s work, which will be kept on permanent display at the museum.
Ronnie Williford has not been back to Loveland since his brother died prior to Friday’s event.
“The word museum, in my monkey brain, I want to read it as ‘mausoleum,’” he said. “I like to think that that’s because when an artist passes, I don’t think his soul is where he’s been laid to rest. I think if you really want to see the artist and speak to them, you have to go where their work is hanging, where their work is on display. I think your best conversations are in the museum, where you can see their thumbprints dried in the oil paint, or their fingerprints cast in the bronze. That’s where they really are. And if you want to learn something, that’s the place you go to talk to them.”
