Nature's simple beauty

MAPLETON — VaLoy Eaton, Utah's great landscape artist, carries a camera with him in the car wherever he goes, never knowing when he might see another future painting passing by his window.

He took nearly 250 photos just driving to and from Vernal to visit his daughter last month. He spied a pond on the side of the road and was struck by the way the light was striking it, with rapids in the stream below sparkling like diamonds in the sun, and sheep gathered around it. He was already past the pond before he realized it was painting material. He slammed on his brakes, turned around and went back to take pictures.

"I keep my eyes open and try to be alert," he says. "But sometimes it takes a minute."

Earlier in the trip he saw hills that rolled up to the top of the mountains, with clouds and snow and light playing off them, and he realized it would be a perfect addition to an unfinished painting he was working on at home. He pulled over and took more photos.

It's an old routine in the Eaton home. When Eaton's children were young and riding in the car, they groaned every time their father slowed the car. Not another painting. He never knows when or where inspiration will strike. He was backing out of his driveway en route to the bank one morning when he spotted a man shoeing horses in the corral next to his house.

"Holy cow," he said to his wife and business partner, Ellie, "that's got to be a painting."

He hustled out of the car and snapped dozens of shots.

Eaton, a former BYU basketball player and high school coach, has been painting Utah landscapes in thick, rich strokes of oil paint for more than half his 66 years. They aren't paintings of the grand and obvious, but subtler scenes along Utah's back roads or at the end of his driveway.

Some consider "River Bank" to be among his best paintings; it is a rendering of nothing more spectacular than a river bank gouged out of a meadow, with patches of snow and barren trees. It is a scene Utahns see hundreds of times, but isolated and re-created under Eaton's hand it is poetic. As one observer noted, Eaton can make tire tracks in muddy snow look beautiful.

There is a painting of boys shooting a BB gun in buttery summer light — a slice of Americana that is so warm you can feel what the day feels like on your skin — and there is one of a woman (hint: it's Ellie) standing in a garden shielding her eyes against the setting sun, and there is one of a rusty old truck and a barn, and there are hundreds of pure landscapes layered with old fences against golden fields under the foothills and mountains and sky and cloud.