Travis Fulton sits under a granite arch sculpture at Woody Creek Ranch. Fulton’s sculpture is on display at the Aspen Collective through August 24.
Few artists have left as lasting an impact on Aspen’s cultural and physical institutions over the past 50 years as Travis Fulton. He co-founded the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village in 1969. In 1980, he and the late Nick DeWolf designed and built the first computer-controlled dancing fountain, which remains a popular attraction in downtown Aspen today.
Tonight, Fulton’s exhibition, “A Hoofprint in the Sand Slowly Filling with Water,” opens at the Aspen Collective in the gallery of the Wheeler Opera House. The opening is from 6-10 p.m. The exhibition runs through August 24.
“I have always been impressed by the complexity of Travis’ artistic work,” said DJ Watkins, owner of the Aspen Collective. “He created the dancing fountain, architectural lamps, sculptures, not to mention his larger land art projects and commissions in the Roaring Fork Valley. The fact that he lives his life like a work of art is a testament to his genius.”
When Fulton was a boy, his father noticed that he was carving sculptures out of anything he could get his hands on. His father apprenticed him to John Angel, a world-famous sculptor who created many of the bronzes on the front of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.
When he was 16, Fulton’s great-uncle Chester suggested he become an engineer. Fulton’s father told him, “You can either help people as an engineer by building bridges for them, or you can enrich their lives as an artist after they cross the bridge,” Fulton said in an interview. “I chose the latter option.”
Fulton first came to Aspen in 1963 when he took a year off from Brandeis University to work for Franz Berko. He took photographs on the mountain and developed them in the darkroom and worked as a carpenter during the summer.
Fulton moved to Aspen in 1969 and helped establish the Anderson Ranch Arts Center with Paul Soldner and Brad Reed, where he spent the next two years teaching drawing and sculpture while also building a bronze foundry.
In 1980, DeWolf and Fulton designed and built the world’s first computer-controlled fountain in downtown Aspen. Controlled rectifiers make the water jets dance so that the same 20-minute pattern is not repeated for 75,000 years. Peter Hutter designed the fountain’s infrastructure in the 1980s and again in 2015.
The work exhibited at the Aspen Collective is the result of a horseback riding tour of Kenya that Fulton took and consists entirely of sculptures.
Artist Travis Fulton is behind the dancing Aspen fountain, which he designed in 1980. Fulton’s sculpture is the centerpiece of a new exhibition at the Aspen Collective called “A Hoofprint in the Sand Slowly Filling with Water.” There will be an opening party at the gallery tonight from 6-10 p.m.
“The work represents the timeless forms and energies found there,” Fulton said. “In abstraction, reason and imagination converge like myth. I am drawn to the integration of natural forms with the elements of primitive sculpture – their formal simplicity, coherence and wild expressiveness.”
Fulton said he expresses a certain emotion with each of his pieces and then tries to create pieces that are minimalistic but elegant.
“Each work is born out of the emotions and thoughts I am dealing with, and my goal is to integrate these elements in such a way that I leave out everything that is not essential and emphasize what is essential,” he says.
Fulton has been an artist for about 70 years. When asked what advice he would give to a young artist, he replied, “Be confident about the adventure of your mind.”
