Art-record project may halt

An ambitious project to record what may be Utah's oldest art is in danger of running out of money before it's finished.

The art is that of the Barrier Canyon style, beautiful, spooky and sophisticated paintings and incisings on cliff walls. They are scattered from the Wasatch Plateau to western Colorado and from the north rim of the Grand Canyon to Vernal.

Barrier Canyon is a distinctive form of art, often showing large figures, elongated shamans with huge eyes, birds, rabbits and bighorn sheep. Some of them look like spirit figures.

"Anthropomorphic torsos may have sheep heads with snake tongues ... wings, bird's-feet or plant roots for feet," Salt Lake artist David Sucec wrote in a paper, "Barrier Canyon Style Rock Art."

The paper continued, "Snake bodies may have sheep heads ... with bird's legs and feet. Sheep torsos may have canine heads, human arms and hands, or bird feet."

The Great Gallery in Horseshoe Canyon is so impressive that a separate section of Canyonlands National Park was set aside to protect it.

These masterpieces in ochre apparently were painted over an enormous period. The earliest dated examples of the style are 8,500 years old, and most seem to be thousands of years old. One date for the most recent Barrier Canyon example is about 1,700 years ago.

Sucec and Craig J. Law, an art professor at Utah State University, have been working since 1991 to make detailed photographs and descriptions of all Barrier Canyon art. So far they've recorded about 300 sites and Sucec thinks another 100 may be somewhere in the desert.

"We know about eight or 10 more, maybe," he said.

In the past they've made a spring and a fall expedition each year, packing photographic gear to remote locations. But not this year.

"We're getting real short on funds," Sucec said. "We had to cancel our autumn trip this year because we didn't get enough funding to do it." Next spring, they plan to use their remaining resources to study sites in Canyonlands National Park.

"If the agencies and legislators and the arts council and all the other people realized how significant this is — this is truly unique on a global scale — I would think they would want to support getting a record of it before any more disappeared," Sucec told the Deseret Morning News.