Charles Rockey loved to play a simple trick on the people who visited his art studio in the heart of Manitou Springs.

Now affectionately called getting “magicalized” by those who knew him, he’d ask people to look into an ornately framed mirror on the wall while he fidgeted for a secret button – that didn’t exist – until two hands appeared in the frame.

The magic? There was no mirror, just an opening into the next room. The “magic” was the viewer’s childlike giggle and surprise from their own “through the looking-glass” moment.

Rockey had a way of seeing the magic in the mundane.

His home and studio of more than four decades now serve as the Rockey Art Museum. The mirror is still there for visitors to get magicalized. The walls are clad in his paintings, a mix of fantastic creatures, portraits and landscapes.

Rockey settled in Manitou Springs in 1972 after a divorce, and soon purchased the historic three-story building that now houses the museum for $17,000. Over the next 47 years, he painted almost 1,000 landscapes of the town he dearly loved at the foot of Pikes Peak.

“Manitou’s a very paintable place,” said David Ball, the museum’s special projects manager and co-designer of Rockey’s 2015 book, Love Songs of Middle Time. “It has plenty of historic buildings and many of those are next to Fountain Creek that runs through town. With mountains surrounding Manitou on three sides, there are all kinds of interesting scenes to paint. The town has a lot of character.”

For decades, Rockey would often take a walk and set up his easel to capture a different perspective. “You literally walk out the back of the building, you look this way, there’s a picture,” Ball said. “You go up on top of the hill, you look down on the alley, there’s another picture.”

Floyd Tunson, a Manitou Springs-based artist, knew Rockey for more than 40 years as a friend, neighbor and creative peer.

Branding Rockey “a quintessential Manitouan,” Tunson said he was a local fixture: You could round any corner in town, and there was Rockey, brush in hand. “He was always out doing plein-air painting. Charlie was all over the place. You could go anywhere and catch Charlie Rockey out working,” Tunson said.

The resulting works capture intricate details and expansive panoramas. Rockey likened Manitou Springs to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, and it shows in his ethereal paintings of the town’s nooks and crannies. He often sketched and painted the Wheeler Town Clock, topped with a statue of the Greek goddess of eternal youth, Hebe, just outside the museum’s front window.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1932, Rockey grew up in Evergreen, Colorado. He attended the Chicago Art Institute, served a stint in the U.S. Army and earned a pair of art degrees, then worked as a middle-school art teacher in Colorado Springs for 30 years before retiring to focus on his art full-time.

Profit motive had nothing to do with Rockey’s prolific career. He abhorred the commercialization of art, and he often preferred to lend out his paintings rather than sell them. Rockey did have several sold out one-man shows in Manitou. Even so, his retirement from teaching was his main source of income and his expenses were notably low. Ball called Rockey “a very frugal guy.”

Rockey’s philosophy was inspired by one of his artistic heroes, Vincent Van Gogh, who, he said, didn’t just paint what he saw, he painted what he felt. He was always aware of the possible distortion of art by the influence of money. In a 2015 interview with KRCC, a Colorado Springs radio station, Rockey said, “Art and money don’t mix, I mean they really don’t. If you’re painting to make money, then the artwork is going to lose out. I painted because I had to paint.”

Several Manitou Spring businesses are still among the recipients of Rockey’s art loans, including Adam’s Mountain Cafe and the Cliff House Hotel. Adam’s Mountain Cafe owner Farley McDonough said that Rockey’s works have hung on her restaurant’s walls since the 1990s. “There was no discussion of selling any of the work. It was literally just being hung for the community,” McDonough said. “He had no desire or taste for attaching any monetary value to his artwork, so he wouldn’t even talk about it.

“Anytime that Rockey decided where a piece was going to go, it was because he trusted that you were going to honor the artwork for the artwork, not for the monetary value of what it could be.”

McDonough said the paintings are a portal into the past. “It’s very comforting to look at it and see Manitou, but you’re also seeing Manitou the way that it was 30 years ago.

“It’s funny. People eat here and not say anything about them or maybe they don’t notice them. And other people come and seek me out and they’re like, ‘I feel like I’m eating in a fine art museum. How can I be sitting amongst these incredible pieces of fine art while I’m eating a burrito?’ ”

Rockey was something of a study in contrast to himself. Tunson spoke of how the artist’s grizzled appearance sometimes gave people the wrong impression. During an art show in downtown Colorado Springs, Rockey looked like he sprung from the pages of a fantasy novel.

A passing family was shaken by his appearance. “One parent grabbed her kid and said, ‘Don’t go over there!’ ” Tunson laughed.

Appearances, however, can be deceiving. Rockey often challenged assumptions at first glance throughout his art, from hidden figures, faces and meanings in fantasy pieces to exaggerated self-portraits of his famously prominent nose.

Rockey would sometimes dress as a wizard for Halloween and pass out candy to trick-or-treaters. He would position a paper mache sculpture of an old woman in a chair behind him. Children thought she was a witch, but books don’t always match the cover. Rockey would tell them that she was actually a kind soul, pointing out how tenderly she held her stuffed pet opossum in her lap.

The old woman is now part of the Rockey Art Museum’s collection, at the bottom of a staircase at the back of the studio. The story is one of many memories that keeps Rockey’s magic alive.

Rockey was a man with many stories, often sharing his tales with passersby and visitors as he sat outside his studio or painted just inside the window. The town planned a concert in the spring of 2019 to honor Rockey when he passed a few weeks prior at the age of 87. The concert quickly became part of his memorial as the community mourned the loss of a beloved artist.

The studio and home remain mostly the same. His favorite hats and walking sticks hang inside the front door, right where Rockey had them. A hulking sculpture of Zebulon Pike reigns over the room decked in frames and furnishings sculpted of special “goop” he fashioned himself. There are crusty old palettes with miniature mountains of multicolored oil paints and other detritus of a hardworking artist scattered throughout the house.

The museum captures his evolution as a man and as an artist. Like a time capsule, the studio and museum is a monument to an unforgettable Colorado artist. The museum takes visitors along Rockey’s long and winding journey from magical realms to Manitou Springs and back.




Rockey Art Museum is located at 10 Cañon Ave. in Manitou Springs. It is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday to Sunday. www.rockeyartmuseum.org