From Deseret News archives:
Al Rounds: Utah painter's 'calling' is a stroke of wonder
He paused a moment.
"Know what I was thinking while I was coughing?" He pointed to a large flower. "I was thinking that hollyhock would make a good painting."
To Rounds, the world is a series of passing images trying out for a painting. Even while the man is doubled over with coughing and struggling to catch his breath, his painter's eye never stops roaming the world for another painting.
This is Rounds' life: He'll be driving down a highway and suddenly pull off to the side of the road. His family knows the routine. He reaches under the seat for his camera and bounds out of the car to take pictures.
In search of just the right angle for a painting, he has climbed out on tree limbs, fallen into lakes and streams with his camera, scaled no-trespassing fences, risked land mines, dodged rock-throwing Palestinians, ventured onto a single-lane train trestle over the Washington, D.C., beltway in which the only escape would have been a long drop to the freeway and hiked a mountain in thigh-deep snow for several hours.
With his family in tow, he has traveled the world on a painter's budget, camping out, living with friends or staying in cheap hotels. There were days when Rounds and his wife and young children would drive from sunrise to sunset in Utah, looking for "paintings." Sometimes Rounds would walk while the family followed in the car.
He has traipsed around the Nauvoo, Ill., countryside in temperatures so cold that his camera froze. He had to sit in the car, warm up the camera, stuff it in his shirt to keep it warm, then run into a field, take a picture, stuff the camera back in his shirt and return to the car to warm up before repeating the whole process.
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