Despite its dusty reputation as one of America's most arid states, a thirsty place where slick rock and red rock dominate the landscape, there are places in Utah that look as if they were rifled away from western Virginia's slumbering Appalachians while no one was watching and plunked down here. Michael Workman can tell you where these pastoral places are or, better yet, show you through the dozens of brooding landscapes he's captured, not on canvas, but on wood.
One such place lies below 10,362-foot Seely Mountain, a ponderous mass of earth, rock and forest held up by the Wasatch Plateau. Rolling away from Seely's western flanks are the Sanpete Valley's rich, verdant meadows, dotted here and there by nodding herds of sheep, cattle, horses and the occasional tree are two.
"I came to hunt in Wales as a boy," recalls the soft-spoken Workman, an artist who thought of Sanpete County's sleepy towns of Wales, Milburn, Fairview and Spring City four or five years ago when he found northern Utah's growth had fiendishly conspired to slow his brush. "As things keep growing up north, it doesn't inspire me as much."
Workman rekindled his inspiration by drifting along Sanpete County's backroads, gazing across its pastures, hiking its mountainsides. In this panorama he found the simpleness of life, in plain view for one and all to see, staring him right in the face. The agrarian landscape served as a time machine; its fields, some fallow, others flush with hay, still more grazed by livestock, shuttled the artist back to 19th century Utah. It's a setting harder and harder to find, let alone imagine, in our increasingly automated and frenetic world. It's a setting Workman believes evokes "an innocence that is difficult for (people) to find in their daily lives."
Such innocence long has existed in Spring City, an agricultural community lost in time when Interstate 15 removed the need for U.S. 89 to serve as Utah's main north-south artery. Settled in 1852 by English and Dutch homesteaders sent there by Brigham Young, Spring City today remains the best example of the 19th century Mormon-style village in which there was a residential town center surrounded by orchards, fields and pastures.
"Spring City still has that feeling," the 38-year-old Workman, who finds much of his inspiration within a 20-mile radius of his studio, says during a break from his easel on the second floor of the town's old General Mercantile building. "There are still a lot of working farms. A lot of the farmers are descendants of the original settlers."
That rural setting is captured strongly by the artist, who mastered his craft at Brigham Young University yet hid its depth for a while cranking out architectural renderings. His paintings, in such demand that they are sold through a lottery, often sight-unseen, for many thousands of dollars, are sprinkled with sheep, cattle, horses, even turkeys -- compositional shapes designed to "break up" the setting. One, "Blacks in the Rain," depicts a small herd of Black Angus cattle huddled under a gray, heavy sky. A light drizzle drapes the mountains in the background, muting the green mountainsides.
Giving adding depth to his landscapes is the unusual medium Workman employs. He eschews traditional canvas for the unlikely wooden panel punched from the bottom of a drawer pulled from a rack of drawers decades removed from a more mundane service of holding papers. Covered with muslin, the panels give weight to paintings, creating works of art "that feel like they've been around for 150 years or more already," says Workman.
On these panels arise landscapes the artist manipulates by wielding metal spatulas to scrape the still-wet paint.
"A certain amount of residue always remains on the board, giving it texture and depth. For me, that remaining residue relates to life experiences," says the artist, who might be working on 10 paintings at any one time. "Whatever decisions we make, the influence of those previous choices lies just beneath the surface, and while we struggle with the next, we continue layering over and over. These layers given our lives richness and meaning."
While his work has been widely acclaimed -- a Denver Post critic said Workman's "In the Bitterroot Valley" ... "depicts three grazing horses in a field, but with its burnished sky, brooding forest and roughhewn brush techniques touches the poetic essence of Big Sky country" -- Workman continually struggles.
"I'm never satisfied," he says. "I get times when I'm really excited about what I do, but there are times when I've got to push forward with what I do."
Copyright Kurt Repanshek 2005
