Shortly after arriving in Jerusalem (without their children this time), they were surrounded by a mob of angry Palestinians while driving their rental car in the wrong part of town and were showered with rocks.

"It scared the snot out of me," says Rounds.

Rounds was warned by soldiers not to climb walls or to walk in fields, where he might step on land mines or encounter terrorists, but he did it anyway. He'd stop in the middle of nowhere and walk up the road in search of paintings, while Nancy sat in the car and cried.

"The guards there told me I couldn't walk around because it was dangerous, but that's what I do is walk around," he explains.

Rounds approaches many of his paintings like a historian to reconstruct scenes. He interviews elderly people to get a feel for the era and visits the Utah Historical Society or Daughters of Utah Pioneers to look through old pictures, magazines, city plot maps, books and diaries. He did one painting based solely on a scene that one of Brigham Young's daughters described in a book.

While in Hawaii, Rounds talked to the old-timers about an old chapel that was built on the beach. "I'd sketch, and the more I drew, the more they'd remember," he says. "They'd say, 'No, the door was on the other side. The stilts were higher. The rocks were on the other side and there was a bush right there.' "

Rounds' craft is costly, time consuming and exhaustive, but the painter says, "I love it. It's what I live for."

Al, the spaceman

Rounds is most comfortable when he is in his "painter's world," according to Nancy, and that's where you'll find him most mornings and often late at night, hunched over a painting in the small studio he built with his own hands, behind the door with the chipped blue paint. The walls of the studio are a collage of posters and pictures. On the floor there are stacks of canvases and frames and paintings and boxes spilling over with paint.

"It's cluttered, but I know where everything is," he says.

Rounds, a former LDS bishop and Scoutmaster, is a soft-spoken, gentle man with a sweet, guileless temperament. In conversation he is deliberate and thoughtful, measuring every word.

"He's almost childlike," says Miller, a fan who showed up at Rounds' house one night unannounced and struck up a close friendship. "He's very typical of people with great artistic ability — very sensitive and vulnerable. Like a lot of creative people, he needs to be protected."

That's where Nancy comes in. She is the gatekeeper to Rounds. You don't get to Rounds without going through her. She is the practical one, and Al, in Nancy's words, is the spaceman.