Kissing Camels Garden of the Gods Front Range Ceramic Art Tile
— two heads of red stone, leaning in at the top.
Not only on a wall.
“Two pinnacles of red Lyons sandstone, leaning across the saddle of a fin, their heads just touching. The shape carries from a mile down the road; most visitors see it before they know what they're looking at. The park sits below Pikes Peak, on land the Perkins children gave to Colorado Springs in 1909 with one condition: it stay free, forever. Morning light catches the red of the sandstone; by late afternoon the camels read as a silhouette against the western sky.
Kissing Camels Garden of the Gods Front Range Ceramic Art Tile, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Garden of the Gods is a 1,367-acre public park on the west side of Colorado Springs, El Paso County, Colorado, at roughly 6,400 feet on the eastern flank of the Front Range. The Kissing Camels formation rises near the centre of the park, visible from the Main Loop road and from many of the overlooks along the Perkins Central Garden Trail. Pikes Peak stands about ten miles to the west at 14,115 feet, often framing the rocks. The park was designated a National Natural Landmark in 1971 by the National Park Service. It is owned by the city of Colorado Springs and admission is free, by the wish of the original donor family.
The two pinnacles are eroded fins of Lyons sandstone, a fine-grained, deep-red rock laid down during the Permian period, roughly 280 million years ago, in a coastal dune field that once ran along the western edge of an ancient inland sea. When the Front Range was thrust upward in the Laramide orogeny, the originally horizontal beds were tilted nearly vertical, leaving the sandstone standing on edge as the great red walls visible across the park today. Wind and water cut narrower sections of the standing rock into the saddles and spires that mark the Garden. The two heads of the Kissing Camels are the surviving caps at the top of one such fin.
Admission to Garden of the Gods is free and the park is open year-round, from early morning through evening. The land was donated to Colorado Springs in 1909 by the children of Charles Elliott Perkins, a railroad executive who had bought the parcel in the 1870s; the family's condition was that it remain a public park, free to all. The Kissing Camels are most easily seen from the Main Loop road and from the upper level of the Visitor and Nature Center across Highway 24. The light favours the silhouette at the end of the day; the colour favours morning.