Al Rounds: Utah painter's 'calling' is a stroke of wonder

HOLLADAY — Al Rounds, the Utah artist, was showing a guest around his backyard studio when suddenly his conversation ended with a bout of coughing. Unable to stop, he took his cough outside, where he stood on the porch in the morning sunshine and surrendered to the urge for several long minutes before he was finally able to speak again.

"Sorry about that," he said. "I've been fighting a cold."

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.

For months he was looking for just the right water to place in the foreground of his current painting-in-progress and then one evening, as he was driving by a park near his home after a rain, he saw what he was looking for in a drainage pond of all things. He spent several evenings there watching the play of light on the water and how it reflected the mountains. Reached by cell phone one morning, Rounds was back at the park. "I'm just waiting for something to happen with the sun right now," he told his caller.

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.