Lyons artist Android Jones discovers hope and healing after losing studio in fire
For Lyons digital artist Android Jones, Jan. 18 began much like any other morning. Several inches of snow had fallen the night before, so Jones went outside, put on his headphones and got to work shoveling the driveway.
Jones, an artist of almost 30 years who has shown his art around the world and had his pieces projected onto the Sydney Opera House and the Empire State Building, looked up to see his wife screaming and waving her hands, unable to hear her at first over his music.
“The barn’s on fire,” Jones’ wife told him.
Panicking, Jones drove the mile and a half to his family’s property on Highland Drive, near Colo. 66 and U.S. 36, where a two-story barn his father had built stood next to the house where his mother lives. Jones had grown up on this property, and his father had built a new barn after the original one burned down in 2008.
That barn housed two decades’ worth of Jones’ files, artwork, tools and sketchbooks. He kept a piece there that had been in the Smithsonian museum that he’d hoped to someday pass down to his three children. It wasn’t just the studio space he used five or six times per week — it was “the densest collection of personal and professional information that was — that was me,” Jones said. To him, it felt like a sacred space. And it made him feel connected with his father, who passed away in 2013.
He arrived that snowy morning to find his studio completely engulfed in flames. Black smoke billowed up into the air. Flames were coming out of the doors and windows, and Jones couldn’t go within 10 to 15 feet of the barn without starting to feel his skin burn.
Boulder County fire crews responded quickly and contained the fire before it could spread to Jones’ mother’s house. Jones said he wanted to express his “deep gratitude” for the efforts of the Lyons, Hygiene and Lefthand Creek Fire Departments.
But it was too late to save the barn. Jones watched as the building collapsed into itself, feeling as if he was “getting a preview of what it’d be like to die before I die.”
“I think the drama — just the raw power of the fire, losing everything in such a stunningly violent and dramatic release of energy, and the smoke the and heat of it all — (it) was just so intense,” Jones said. “There were emotions and thoughts that I think I’m still trying to catch up to.”
Although no one was injured, the barn was destroyed. Investigators have not yet released the cause of the fire.
In the days that followed, Jones started to move through the stages of grief, beginning with shock and denial. He wondered if he was being punished somehow. And he worried about what would happen to his family members, who depend on him to support them through his art.
But in addition to grief, he said the week or so since the fire has also brought some new revelations, unexpected insights, and even comfort in places where he hadn’t known he would find it. He called it the “worst best week” of his life.
Jones, who prizes self-reliance, has always enjoyed helping others, but until this incident had struggled with asking others for help. But with his studio and everything in it now gone, he realized he had no choice. He has a family to support and members of his team who are counting on him to pay their salaries. So he started a fundraiser.
And the community has risen to meet the occasion: As of Friday evening, his GoFundMe page had raised more than $275,000.
“I’m seeing (people) show up in a way like I never could have imagined,” said Jones. “So you know, it’s a victory. It’s a victory for our community. … It feels like a victory for the human spirit and the relationship between artists and the people that support them. I never would have come up with this kind of story on my own, and now I’m living it. And (I’m) just so, so grateful to everyone.”
Jones said that for him, art had always been a way that he exchanged value in the world, and he felt that he was receiving love and support from others because they loved his work. But the support has continued pouring in even now that years of his life’s work are gone, and he feels he has a new relationship with himself, his friends and his community because of it.
“I feel like without the art in the way, for the first time, I was actually able to feel everybody’s love for me and not just the thing that I thought I was doing that made me valuable for them. And it’s just been … the most transformational journey.”
Once the debris and rubble are cleaned up, Jones said, he plans to rebuild the barn.
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