Call it rock steady. The solitary and statuesque black monolith looming over the Great Salt Lake shore near Interstate-80 stood for decades as a traditional test of a Utah painter’s skills.
Utah painters of the late 1890s and early 1900s flocked to the ancient volcanic remnant. Alfred Lambourne tackled it. JT Harwood, John Hafen, Richard Tallant assayed it as well. So did Paul Fjellboe, a painter so eccentric he loaned his numerous works to Salt Lake City medical and dental offices for a nominal deposit, then seldom reclaimed them.
Back in time when nearby Saltair Resort was the ideal spot for a family outing or first date, Salt Lake City denizens knew its silent stare from the waters of what was then called Black Rock Beach. Stories were passed from generation to generation about diving from the rock’s top-most point, or even selling hot dogs near the monument.
Thomas Alder, managing partner at Williams Fine Art, noticed that images of the rock turned up repeatedly during research for a forthcoming book on northern Utah he will co-author.
“I never figured out why,” he said. “But that beach was certainly an area lots of people flocked to.”
Today the remains of a volcanic “plug” formed when the flume stopped spewing lava sits still mostly for the odd graffiti artist. All the more reason, Alder thought, to bring an old tradition into the present time. The gallery sent an e-mail invitation in May asking current Utah painters to tackle the formation, and for a new exhibit of Black Rock paintings.
“Several of them didn’t even know what I was talking about,” Alder said. “One wrote back, ‘Oh yeah, that thing I see out the car window with graffiti and brine flies?’ But then they got out there to paint it themselves, and really had an experience.”
The resulting new paintings run the gamut, Alder said, ranging from stark depictions of the rock’s harsh beauty to the whimsy of childhood memories the site evokes.
David Meikle, a Utah landscape painter who recently saw his mammoth painting of Mount Olympus unveiled at the new City Creek Center downtown, was one of the chosen. The 40-year-old artist had no idea what to expect driving out to the shoreline to set up his easel.
“The old paintings of Black Rock strike you as very romanticized,” Meikle said. “When I went out there I was struck by the location’s vast openness, and swarms of brine and dragon flies. It was a bit hostile, really.”
But it made for a fascinating encounter with intense contrasts in light, he said. And the challenge of painting an unfamiliar object was an opportunity he couldn’t turn down.
Dennis Smith, another painter in the exhibit, remembers Black Rock with more clarity. Now 68 years old, Smith was a child in the 1940s and ’50s, during the Saltair Resort’s last hurrah before a fire shut it down and ended the shoreline’s festive era.
Smith launched into the Williams Gallery’s assignment with relish, painting four works spanning various times. One shows him as a younger man, floating in the salty water near the geological formation. Another finds the rock draped in the glow of a sunset. A third depicts the rock, and Kennecott’s smokestack, in the distance with a Saltair roller coaster in the foreground. Smith’s most intriguing rendering, however, finds members of the fated Donner Party passing the Black Rock on their way into winter in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains.
Smith said the giant rock is for him both a location on Utah’s map and a point in historical consciousness.
“It’s a pivot point — a marker that tells you where you were in relation to home,” Smith said. “Black Rock is a landmark in time and awareness, and all that time somehow melds together when you have a physical marker such as the one we have at the Great Salt Lake.”
1 comment:
That is amazing! What an incredible gift.
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