Fabric artist Anne Urbanek is a true pioneer among those whose modern works are derived from writings on the rocks by prehistoric Indians.
About a dozen local artists over the years have begun depicting petroglyphs and pictographs in a variety of media, from sketchpaper and clay to stone and metal. But Urbanek was the first to put petroglyphs on T-shirts, and she continues to reign supreme in the Four Corners region as the only batik artist specializing in rock art designs.A native Chicagoan, Urbanek was transformed from housewife to artist 13 years ago when she first wed the ancient dye printing technique to the ancient rock art of Native Cultures.
The rewards were immediate. Within the first year, she sold her first batik T-shirts at a local craft fair and agreed to retail her line of wearable rock art at a local trading post.
Over the past dozen years, Urbanek established outlets at five Western museums and five galleries, including the latest, Durfee's Gallery in Scottsdale, Ariz., which will begin carrying her work this fall.
She has done major works on commission for various organizations, including a wall-hanging for a nurse-midwives college showing pregnant figures and birthing scenes from a petroglyph panel west of Moab.
Recently Urbanek signed a contract for special orders of petroglyph reproductions for decorator Kim Grinnelle of Interiors Co. in Tucson to place in homes.
As the market for Urbanek's work has grown, the range of her artistic expression in form and color has too. Her T-shirts, once limited to browns and natural hues, grew to encompass a full range of colors, from fuchsia to denim blue. Some T-shirts are multicolored.
She also progressed from T-shirts to dressier tops and full outfits, and by 1986 was producing framed batiks that claimed the sweepstakes two different years at the Grand County Fair and first prize in fabric art at the Utah State Fair.
"I think I've hit on something people like," Urbanek said, characteristically unassuming and demure. "My work reminds people of what they're here for, and they take it home and remember."
What Urbanek believes her work reminds people of is the quiet and calm of the red rocks and how the desert vastness made their problems seem small, less pressing.
The images that hikers see pecked or painted onto rocks and boulders throughout the Southwest are the petroglyphs and pictographs that Urbanek uses as her subjects. Some are believed to be nearly 1,000 years old.
The artist's first encounter with prehistoric rock art was in Canyonlands National Park around 1971 when she moved to Moab with her husband John, who worked for the National Park Service. She was unaware she had a creative streak until the elements of rock art and dye printing came together six years later.
Urbanek first took a liking to batik 23 years ago after receiving a piece of the fabric art as a gift while in India. After moving to Moab, neighbor girls taught her a simple batik method that she improved upon through trial and error, guided by books.
First she dyes fabric a light color, then draws reproductions of petroglyphic figures onto the fabric with a hot, removable beeswax, using a tool called a tjanting. The fabric is dyed a second time, a darker color. After the wax is removed, the light figure remains.
In the second dyebath, a "crackle effect" is created when the dye seeps through cracks in the hardened wax, leaving fine lines on the figures that suggest, as the petroglyphs do, an essence of aging. Urbanek said that was what inspired her to combine rock art and batik.
"I feel that batik is the perfect medium for rock art, because of the crackle effect."
Most recently, Urbanek locked onto the form of expression using petroglyphs that has excited her the most. She began creating what she calls "scenes," desert landscapes populated with the figures that suggest a merging of dimensions, the past with the present.
"I love the combination of timelessness of the rocks and arches and the timelessness of rock art," she said.
One of her first landscapes depicts a string of 16 humpbacked flute players marching single-file across a desert, tiny against the towering buttes and spires in the background. The reds and oranges of the scene, intensified by a sun peeking from behind a sheer wall, create a feeling that the tiny figures are making slow but determined progress across the hot expanse.
Urbanek's ability to capture the feeling of the desert harkens back to the day she first saw red-rock country. "I remember it just didn't seem quite real. There was a program on TV, `Lost In Space,' where people walked around places that were like another planet.
"That's what people say about my pictures, that they're surrealistic."
In five years, Urbanek has raised her production level from several hundred shirts to 1,500 shirts a year and said she can hardly keep up with demand. She is one artist who makes a decent living off her art. New orders and reorders are continually coming in - many from fans who loved their shirts so much they wore them until holes developed.
Each piece Urbanek produces is one of a kind. Though she may redo a particular petroglyph over and over - especially the flute-playing Kokopelli, her favorite figure - each is done laboriously and meticulously by hand. Some figures are smaller than 2 inches, and sometimes they trundle across a huge swath of fabric.
"What I like about this area is there's such a variety of petroglyphs around here, it's no problem doing four dozen shirts and have them all unique," Urbanek said.
Currently her landscapes and framed batiks are carried locally at the Dan O'Laurie Museum and Moab Mercantile & Fine Art Gallery. At the Bracy Brass Rubbing Center at 250 E. 100 South in Salt Lake City in April will be a display of her wall hangings on dowels and driftwood. Her T-shirts are carried at the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City and at various museums, trading posts and other retail outlets in Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and California.