Archie Musick

Archie Musick Garden of the Gods Colorado Springs Modernist Oil Painting

Painter, illustrator and author Archie Musick first came to Colorado Springs in August 1924 with a classmate after high school graduation aboard a Santa Fe freight train, realizing their plan to see some of America. He initially supported himself working on a road crew building a highway to Denver. In Colorado Springs he took Charlie Bishop’s three-week Lightning Painting course aimed at producing bucolic wilderness scenes painted on cardboard or on slabs sawed from logs that were popular with the tourists. He soon became oriented to the fine arts, having been introduced by a student at the recently-established Broadmoor Art Academy to Francis Drexel Smith, one of its founding members. After summer employment in 1926 at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, Musick returned to Colorado Springs for summer study at the Broadmoor Art Academy with Randall Davey and Ernest Lawson, respectively, in 1927 and 1928. In 1929 and 1930 Musick studied with Kimon Nicholaides and Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League in New York. He enjoyed a life-long friendship with Benton who periodically visited Colorado and whose treatment of regionalist subject matter guided him in his own choice of Colorado material in the 1930s and later. Returning to Colorado Springs in 1932, he studied with Boardman Robinson at the Broadmoor Art Academy before going on to become art instructor for a number of years at the city’s Cheyenne Mountain School beginning in 1935. Musick created a number of murals under the Works Progress Administration across Nebraska and Colorado in the early 1940s. After serving in World War II, Musick moved his family back to Colorado to continue teaching in the Colorado Springs school district, where he had taught prior to the war.