YOUR SPACE: At home with hair, at home putting colors on canvas

One person's blemish is another person's beauty mark. It's all in the eye of the beholder, says June Heimsoth.

She should know - she's an artist and a career hairstylist.

In the hair chair, she improves the way people look. On canvas, she tries to improve their outlook.

Her latest challenge: making the city's biggest blight look good.

The massive bald spot on the side of the mountain known as "the scar" inspired a recent acrylic painting. It shows the reddish-brown quarry bathed in sunshine against purple mountains and blue sky.

"That scar is like Rodney Dangerfield. It just doesn't get no respect," she says. "It serves a very useful function. It's my mission to make people appreciate it."

The Colorado Springs native was a kid when the quarry was built in 1954. It paved many roads and produced the concrete to widen Interstate 25, but that hasn't earned it many fans.

"We look at it with a jaundiced eye," she says. "It really is pretty, but we see it as a scar. Look at how symmetrical it is. It reminds me of a Mayan temple."

Her love of art started young; at age 5, she won a dog drawing contest sponsored by a Denver radio station. But she didn't pursue art after her teens. "I knew I was lousy," she says," so I quit."

She went to beauty school, raised kids, ran salons and didn't look back until the day something in the paper ignited this passion from the past.

"It was a Gazette photograph. Bob Jackson did a picture back in the mid-1990s of a man riding a horse around a pond at Gleneagle, and I just thought it was the prettiest darn picture. It took me about a month to paint it, and I just kept on painting."

She takes lessons. "I try really hard," she says.

Heimsoth, president of Colorado Springs Art Guild, paints in her studio at Bijou Gallery and Salon, 2103 E. Bijou (www.bijouart gallery.com). Natural light streams through the front wall of windows into the shop where she plies both trades. There are chairs for haircuts, and tables of beauty products. Instead of the usual glamour shots of models with dazzling hairdos, the walls sport her ribbon-winning portraits and landscapes.

Hair clients are her best art customers. Paintings go for $150 to $1,500, with an asking price of $600 for the scar painting.

Heimsoth likes the chatty side of doing hair and the solitude of painting.

"Sometimes it's nice to sit down and not talk to people," she says. "By the same token, sometimes if I'm sitting here painting for hours it gets kind of lonesome."

"The thing about hair is that it is instant gratification. You can take somebody who looks pretty bad and make them look pretty good in about an hour."

Like any hairstylist, she looks at people's do's - and don'ts - with a discerning eye.

"It used to be Lisa Lyden's hair that I would have liked to gotten hold of, but now she's got it right. She finally grew it out to a chin-line bob. She's one of my heroes. She's very cool."

As for Donald Trump: "He'd be better off if he'd just let it go gray, and I'm not a big fan of gray hair. I'm sure I could do better than what he's doing. But you never know, he might just have the world's worst hair."

Maybe he should hire her to do his portrait.

-

Tell me your stories: 636-0253 or andrea.brown@gazette.com