Red Rocks Amphitheatre sunrise Denver Metro Ceramic Art Tile
— — the rock catches the light before the city does.
Not only on a wall.
“Two great fins of red sandstone bracket an open-air theatre fifteen miles west of Denver. Ship Rock to the south, Creation Rock to the north, 9,525 seats between them. At sunrise the eastern plains hand the light over slowly, and the rock catches the first orange while the city below is still under shadow. Yogis come up the steps in summer. Pilgrims come up the steps on Easter morning, as they have since 1947. Most mornings, no event, no crowd, just the seats and the stone and the sound of someone's footsteps on the back row.
Red Rocks Amphitheatre sunrise Denver Metro 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.
Red Rocks Amphitheatre sits inside Red Rocks Park, in Morrison, Colorado, about fifteen miles west of downtown Denver and roughly 6,450 feet above sea level. The Denver Mountain Parks system has held the land since 1928. The amphitheatre itself was designed by Denver architect Burnham Hoyt, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps under the New Deal, and opened on June 15, 1941. The two monoliths that form its walls, Ship Rock and Creation Rock, are exposed slabs of the Fountain Formation, sandstone laid down roughly 290 million years ago. The seating bowl holds 9,525 people. Sunrise arrives over the eastern plains, with downtown Denver visible across the foreground.
The amphitheatre faces almost due east, with the open mouth of the bowl pointed at the Denver skyline fifteen miles off and the high plains beyond. First light reaches the top of Creation Rock well before it reaches the seats; the sandstone shifts from cool oxblood to orange to gold across the first half-hour after sunrise. The summer Yoga on the Rocks series fills the bowl on Saturday mornings in July. On Easter, the venue holds a public sunrise service that has met here every year since 1947, often drawing more than ten thousand people before the sun is fully up over the plains.
The two formations that wall the amphitheatre, Creation Rock to the north and Ship Rock to the south, are exposed slabs of the Fountain Formation, a Permian-Pennsylvanian sandstone roughly 290 million years old. The same red rock surfaces north along the Front Range at the Flatirons above Boulder and south at the Garden of the Gods near Colorado Springs. Each of the two monoliths rises about three hundred feet above the seating bowl. The natural rake of the slabs gives the venue its famed acoustic: sound reflects between the two faces and the high back wall with almost no amplification needed. Burnham Hoyt's 1941 design touched the land lightly, and almost nothing was cut.