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.
The result of such dedication is a large collection of remarkably clean, crisp, starkly beautiful landscapes that have made him one of Utah's best known and admired painters. He is known mostly for his renderings of Utah landscapes and historical sites, often set in the early days of Utah and Mormonism. His work appears frequently in the Ensign, the LDS Church's monthly magazine, and hangs on walls at the Salt Lake City-County Building, Abravanel Hall, numerous LDS temples, Utah businesses, malls and the LDS Church Office Building, but mostly in Mormon family rooms.
"He is the premier landscape painter of LDS historic sites," says Jay Todd, former longtime editor of the Ensign. "He's made a great contribution to the Utah art community and to Latter-day Saints. His name will be permanent in the LDS community. He's made a real mark."
Rounds has painted the Sacred Grove, the Hill Cumorah, the Susquehanna River, Kirtland Temple, Liberty Jail and many more LDS historical sites, but his work goes well beyond Mormonism. His personal favorite is "View From Main Street," a serene, crystalline winter scene commissioned by entrepreneur Larry Miller.
"You look at one of his paintings, and you say, 'That's Al Rounds,' " says Dave Erickson, owner of David Erickson's Fine Art. "He evokes a feeling; he creates a dialogue between the viewer and artist. Every time you look at it you're stimulated."
A life-altering dream
The most singular trademark of Rounds' paintings is that they appear to be done in oils, but they're watercolors. "I paint like a landscape oil painter with watercolors," he says.
Watercolor is a tricky, technically demanding medium that causes most artists, including Rounds, to pull out their hair. Mistakes in oil painting can often be reworked and manipulated on the canvas, but not watercolor.
"It's horrible," says Rounds, 47. "I've been painting full time for 25 years, and I spent one month on a painting recently and threw it away. You can mess up a painting with just one stupid stroke or one thing that gets away from you. You can't save it. You just have to start over. Watercolors are totally unforgiving."
But when watercolor works, it is a luminous medium, and few have mastered it as well as Rounds. Rounds' skies are so smoothed and lush that someone once accused him of airbrushing them.
"People imitate Al's content, but not his wonderful grated washes that create his skies," says Erickson.
Rounds' venture into watercolor and LDS art was one of circumstance and, he hints, providence. After graduating from the University of Utah in 1977, he decided to pursue a full-time career as a painter immediately, despite all the warnings he had received from various acquaintances that he would never be able to earn a decent living. His wife, Nancy, the practical one in the marriage, the manager of Team Rounds, sat down and calculated that her husband would have to sell three or four paintings a day to make it financially. At the time, he was selling his paintings for $25, including the frame, which amounted to a $15 profit.
Rounds, who was trained primarily as an oil painter, decided "I couldn't do three paintings a day in oil (they don't dry fast enough, for one thing). I tried. I started doing watercolors just because I could sit on location and do two or three day. At night I'd go home and work on oils. I did watercolors so I could make a living. But the more I did, the better I got, and I started enjoying it. I started doing things with watercolors that hadn't been done before. I experimented with washes and papers. I knew the techniques before I knew the words for them."
In 1979, Rounds heard his calling, so to speak. He had a dream — he won't divulge its details — that sent him on the road and changed the direction of his career.
Rounds, his three children and Nancy, who was pregnant, piled into a tiny camper-pickup truck and spent a month driving to and from New York without air conditioning, stopping at LDS historical sites along the way.
"I found the paintings," he says.
'What I live for'
A couple of years later, Rounds decided he had to make a decision about the direction of his career. He laid out two choices for Nancy: He could make good money by pursuing American historical scenes and Western art, which was becoming increasingly popular, or he could follow his heart and paint Mormon themes and eke out a living. They chose the latter.
Rounds began traveling regularly in search of LDS historical sites and paintings. Previously, he had always painted on location, but for practical reasons he began using a camera to record images that he could refer to back in his studio. After each trip, Rounds searches through hundreds of photographs to find a painting, and when he is ready for new material the family hits the road again.
They traveled to New York four more times. They spent four months in England. They spent three months in Hawaii, camping out on the beach for part of the time to save money. While old-timers showed Rounds old church sites around the island, his family hung out on the beach.
"It got old," says Nancy. "We had rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And we got lice."
They spent one summer driving around Utah in a motor home, again with no air conditioning — "Such a miserable trip," says Nancy. Their travels also have taken them to Atlanta, France, the West Indies, Mexico and Jerusalem.
Shortly after arriving in Jerusalem (without their children this time), they were surrounded by a mob of angry Palestinians while driving their rental car in the wrong part of town and were showered with rocks.
"It scared the snot out of me," says Rounds.
Rounds was warned by soldiers not to climb walls or to walk in fields, where he might step on land mines or encounter terrorists, but he did it anyway. He'd stop in the middle of nowhere and walk up the road in search of paintings, while Nancy sat in the car and cried.
"The guards there told me I couldn't walk around because it was dangerous, but that's what I do is walk around," he explains.
Rounds approaches many of his paintings like a historian to reconstruct scenes. He interviews elderly people to get a feel for the era and visits the Utah Historical Society or Daughters of Utah Pioneers to look through old pictures, magazines, city plot maps, books and diaries. He did one painting based solely on a scene that one of Brigham Young's daughters described in a book.
While in Hawaii, Rounds talked to the old-timers about an old chapel that was built on the beach. "I'd sketch, and the more I drew, the more they'd remember," he says. "They'd say, 'No, the door was on the other side. The stilts were higher. The rocks were on the other side and there was a bush right there.' "
Rounds' craft is costly, time consuming and exhaustive, but the painter says, "I love it. It's what I live for."
Al, the spaceman
Rounds is most comfortable when he is in his "painter's world," according to Nancy, and that's where you'll find him most mornings and often late at night, hunched over a painting in the small studio he built with his own hands, behind the door with the chipped blue paint. The walls of the studio are a collage of posters and pictures. On the floor there are stacks of canvases and frames and paintings and boxes spilling over with paint.
"It's cluttered, but I know where everything is," he says.
Rounds, a former LDS bishop and Scoutmaster, is a soft-spoken, gentle man with a sweet, guileless temperament. In conversation he is deliberate and thoughtful, measuring every word.
"He's almost childlike," says Miller, a fan who showed up at Rounds' house one night unannounced and struck up a close friendship. "He's very typical of people with great artistic ability — very sensitive and vulnerable. Like a lot of creative people, he needs to be protected."
That's where Nancy comes in. She is the gatekeeper to Rounds. You don't get to Rounds without going through her. She is the practical one, and Al, in Nancy's words, is the spaceman.
Rounds is famous around his house for his absentmindedness. He couldn't keep a set of keys until Nancy bought him a large green rubber spaceman and attached it to his key ring. "I've had the same set of keys for three years — a record," he says. "But I have lost it a few times."
"Al has a hard time with reality," says Nancy. "He's forgetful. It's exasperating. Sometimes I want to wring his neck."
Nancy handles logistics and finances; Al does one thing: paint. When they travel, she arranges for hotels, flights, car rentals and watches the map. Once, Al ventured on his own to Boston. Nancy sent him with written, step-by-step instructions. He arrived there without his driver's license and then got lost.
"I'll never go again without you," he told her.
This is one of Nancy's "Al" stories: When the family climbed in the car for its first cross-country painting trip to New York, Al turned to Nancy and said, "Which way do I go?"
"Whaddya mean?!" she said. "You go up Parleys Canyon. We're going east."
Says Nancy, "Al's this spaceman floating up in space, painting. Every once in a while I pull him down to Earth. I'm his reality check, I guess. Otherwise, he'd always stay up in space."
They met at a college dance. He had long hair and "dressed really weird, with lots of bright colors," says Nancy. "He stood out. He was painting a lot then. He was doing hard-edged abstract stuff, like a big red ball and a black line on white canvas. I didn't like it."
She introduced him to her LDS parents, this hippie from California who rode a motorcycle and said he wanted to be an artist. They hated him, of course. The first time they laid eyes on Rounds he was sans shoes and shirt. But they quickly warmed to him.
Paintings by the inch
Nancy and Al married in 1974 and began having babies — five in six years (later, they would adopt two more), even while he was still attending the University of Utah. They bought a house in Sandy, and he painted at the family's kitchen table, sometimes while bouncing a child on his knee. Later, he painted in the basement laundry room. They struggled to make ends meet. After Nancy gave birth to a third child, the hospital informed her that she could be released as soon as she made a $100 payment. Rounds did a few quick paintings at home, drove to Trolley Square and sold them, then called Nancy and told her, "I've got the hundred dollars; I'm coming to get you."
Rounds sold his paintings by the square inch at malls and art shows. He sold them out of his house for 15 years because he couldn't afford a gallery, which takes half the profits in commission. His former professors told him he was squandering his talent by selling rapid-production paintings in malls, but he had a family to care for.
His chief source of income in those days was thrice-yearly showings at the house of a wealthy friend. Rounds would paint for several months, hoard his work, then sell all of them in a single night at these shows. It would provide Rounds with enough money to pay his debts, buy groceries and continue painting.
"I wanted to get better, not faster," says Rounds, "but to make money you have to be faster. Our goal was to get better, take more time."
Rounds began producing prints of his paintings to make them available to those who couldn't afford originals. That provided extra income, which gave Rounds the luxury of spending more time on his paintings, but money has always been tight.
"There were times when we didn't have enough money for groceries, but I didn't tell him because I thought it would hurt his painting," says Nancy. "I felt a lot of pressure. I'd wonder how we were going to make it. I learned to budget. The pressure on me was intense. Now I tell him."
Rounds has been working on a large painting of Salt Lake City's Mount Olympus for four months (which he believes will be his best work ever). "That means we haven't made any money in those four months," says Rounds. "Nancy made it possible that we could get by. She budgeted."
Nancy has been urging Al to stop working on the painting and produce something else that he could sell immediately, but he says he can't think of anything else but his current project. "We live from painting to painting," says Rounds. "Always have, always will."
Rounds has no agent and only one small, family-run gallery in which to sell his originals. The Roundses have always been a mom-and-pop operation, with Nancy overseeing the business side. Miller wants Rounds to expand his subject matter to give himself a broader audience and more revenue.
"He does look at it (painting) as a (church) calling," says Miller, who has seven of Rounds' originals hanging in his house. "But there's room to do more. He's got a great gift."
Gerald Olson, Rounds' old professor, says, "He could show in New York with paintings that were appealing to a general audience. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. There's just not enough money floating around."
Strangers' tears
Rounds produces 10 to 12 paintings a year. Undoubtedly, he could be considerably more profitable and prolific if he didn't refuse to replicate some of his own paintings or if he weren't so meticulous.
Aside from his exhaustive research and travels, he takes weeks or months to find all the pieces of the puzzle for an idea that pops into his head. He sketches a picture from his mind, then "I drive around and try to find the pieces or models to fit it — a pond, or creek willows, or finding the right reflection in the water. Sometimes it's years before I drive by and see the last piece."
Before he ever begins painting, Rounds draws every detail — every shadow, every branch, every rock — on the canvas in pencil so that it looks like a paint-by-number kit. "In my office I've got one of his paintings and there are stones in the pavement," says Miller. "There are thousands of them, and every one of them is outlined. The detail is remarkable. How many hours did he spend doing this?"
The challenge for Rounds is not to over-paint. He must resist the temptation to paint too much detail. "I want to paint just enough to let their minds finish the rest," he says.
Sometimes the other painter in the family, 18-year-old daughter Quinn (she has insisted on being called "Ghost" since she was 2), chides her father, "Why are you finishing it up so much?!"
A painter is not trying to reproduce a photograph, but is trying to evoke feelings. That's why Rounds braved the Nauvoo winter once — "so I could feel what the Saints felt."
Says Rounds, "Edward Hopper (a famed American artist) said, 'If you could say it in words, there'd be no need to paint it.' "
The payoff is when he actually evokes emotion from those who see his paintings. Strangers have found their way to the Rounds' home or to his gallery and stood weeping in front of his paintings.
"That is fulfilling," says Rounds, sitting on the family-room couch with Nancy. "I hope someone can look at my paintings and feel something." Rounds pauses a moment and tears come to his eyes.
"I paint for my wife, too, for her approval. I want to walk in with a painting and have her be excited about it. I'm glad to get a lot of feedback from people who love my work, but it doesn't mean quite as much as approval from my wife and kids."
That said, Rounds got to his feet. It was time to get back to work. He said goodbye and returned to his world of paints.
E-mail: drob@desnews.com