SANPETE COUNTY — If U.S. 89 is off the beaten track, Spring City, located about a mile east of the highway, almost qualifies as boondocks.
Who would expect, in a place like this, to find a dozen serious artists working out of everything from a Main Street storefront to a 19th century Relief Society building? Not amateurs, mind you, but artists who sell tens of thousands of dollars worth of work annually through galleries from Salt Lake City to Paris.
Throw in an art dealer, a restoration contractor, a couple of architects, a furniture craftsman and a professor emeritus of political science, to name a few, and you have an intellectually vibrant art community.
Over the past 30 years, that's what Spring City, situated just south of Mt. Pleasant, has become.
Some artists say the solidity of the Wasatch Plateau to the east, the tranquility of the cultivated Sanpete Valley and the nostalgic feel of Spring City's historic buildings provide subject matter and ambience for the artistic life.
"It's a beautiful place," says Douglas Freyer, a mural painter and illustrator who arrived seven months ago. "It has a great variety of people. Because it's a National Historic District, people are into preserving the past. I feel comfortable here."
Other artists chose the location because of the lifestyle it offers. In Spring City, you can have horses, grow vegetables, watch deer and elk grazing along roadsides, or ponder a moonscape during a pre-dawn jog.
"In our case, it's been more a focus on our lives, our family, our friends, our animals. Our work flows out of the content of our lives," says potter Joe Bennion. He and his wife, Lee, a painter, have lived in Spring City for 27 years.
The town was founded in 1852, when Brigham Young asked James Allred, a settler in Manti about 25 miles to the south, to explore a stream that runs through the area. The Allred family ended up settling beside a natural spring. That's how the town got its name.
In 1910, the population peaked at 1,250. But there wasn't sufficient water to support all the families who wanted to farm around Spring City. The population dwindled. By 1950, Spring City was a semi-ghost town with fewer than 500 residents. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints discussed demolishing the historic ward chapel built with stone quarried nearby.
But things turned around. A few families came from surrounding towns. "Move-ins," the Sanpete County term for anyone who isn't descended from a pioneer settler, arrived from the Wasatch Front and out-of-state. By 2000, the town had a population of about 1,000.
Ironically, the patriarch of the art community, Osral Allred, is a native and a descendant of the town's founder. A nationally known watercolorist and member of the National Watercolor Society, he is retired from the faculty of Snow College in Ephraim, about 10 miles southwest of Spring City. He and his wife are currently serving an LDS mission.
The matriarch of the community and perhaps the first prominent move-in was the late Ella Peacock, a Pennsylvania native who arrived about 1970. Her husband had health problems, and the two of them drove west looking for a drier climate.
In a scenario that has been replayed by other artists, the Peacocks happened into Spring City, saw an old house they liked, stopped and bought it, says Kathryn Parnell, one of Ella Peacock's friends.
Peacock liked to take her easel out in the open air and paint old buildings and farm scenes in subdued hues. "You can see sky here," she once declared. "You can't see sky in Salt Lake, you know." While she didn't market her work as aggressively as some of Spring City's current artists, she took top prizes in state and local shows. She died in 1999.
Nowadays, the pillars of the art community are probably the Bennions, who arrived in 1976. Joe was raised in Orem and Lee is from Merced, Calif. They met and married while they were at Brigham Young University.
A professor who came through their wedding line gave them keys to his second home in Moroni, about 10 miles west of Spring City. So that's where they went for their honeymoon. While exploring Sanpete County, they pulled into Spring City. "As soon as we saw the town, our list of criteria went out the window," says Joe. "Our gut and our heart said this was home."
Using a CB radio, the Spring City postmaster contacted someone whose elderly mother had died. "Are you going to sell your mother's house?" he asked. "I have a nice looking couple here." A week and half later, the Bennions bought the little house.
Over the next seven years, they continued their educations at BYU, mostly on a part-time basis. (Spring City is about an hour's drive from Provo.) Ultimately, Joe completed his master of fine arts degree and Lee her bachelor of fine arts degree.
In 1980, they sold their first house and split the proceeds between a down payment on their current home, a graceful two-story structure built in 1912, and a ramshackle store on Main Street, which became Joe's studio and showroom.
In 1991, they found an abandoned log cabin in town, moved it to their back yard, and spent nine months restoring it for Lee's studio.
For the past decade, they've supported their family from their art. "The core of my clientele is from the Wasatch Front with a smattering of out-of-state tourists that is always growing," says Joe. "A tourist comes through, stays at a guest ranch or bed and breakfast, and stops by to take pots back to Philadelphia."
Lee, who paints figures in family contexts, primarily markets through David Ericson Fine Arts in Salt Lake City. Ericson came through the reception line at her senior show at BYU and offered to represent her. They've worked together ever since. He now owns Ella Peacock's old house, which serves as his country getaway.
Randall Lake, who bought a place in Spring City about four years after the Bennions arrived, is representative of artists who live elsewhere but maintain getaway studios in Spring City.
A protege of Alvin Gittins, the late U. portraitist, Lake received his master of fine arts degree at the U. in the early 1970s and set up a studio in the Guthrie Bicycle Building (158 E. 200 South) in Salt Lake City. He's been there 30 years.
About 1980, he visited Spring City and met Joe Bennion, who took him on a walk past the Relief Society House, built in 1876. Lake knew immediately that he wanted it.
The building had been vacant for decades. Bats were living in the ceiling, cows had slept in it and it was littered with beer cans. But Lake says, "I was nuts for it because of the potential of what it could be." In particular, he loved the oversized windows that let abundant light into the single interior room.
About that time, he was commissioned to paint a portrait of the governor of Wyoming. "When I got that commission, there was no question about this place," he says. The selling price was $20,000. He put $10,000 down.
The structure didn't have a bathroom, and Lake refused to divide the big hall to create an extra room. So a few years later, after getting a special building code exception, he spent $27,000 to install a tiny bathroom under a staircase.
Today, the walls above the tall windows are decorated with portraits. The focal point of the room is a huge easel that once belonged to Gittins. There's a coal stove, a tin sink with a hand water pump, an ice chest that uses block ice and kerosene lamps and candles. The studio epitomizes Lake's belief that "modernity is not all it's cracked up to be."
Because production demands tie him to his Salt Lake City studio, he doesn't make it to Spring City as often as he would like. But eventually, he says, he'll be there permanently. He has purchased a plot in the Spring City cemetery "near Orson Hyde, not the move-ins." (Orson Hyde was a prominent 19th century LDS apostle who spent his final years in Sanpete County.)
Lake, who now paints "subjective" and "expressionistic" florals, landscapes and interiors, markets through Clayton Williams Gallery in the ZCMI Center in Salt Lake, a gallery in Paris, and MJW Fine Art in Orange County, Calif.
A more recent arrival, Linda Budd, bought her restored home in 1998. The house, built in 1891, had been in disrepair until an out-of-town couple bought it and hired Craig Paulsen, a prominent restoration contractor, to restore it. Paulsen himself is a part-time Spring City resident. His wife, M'Lissa, is an artist. Budd bought the house from the couple who had hired Paulsen. She is the third owner.
A Richfield native, Budd received a BFA from Temple University and an MFA from Queens College in New York City. After completing her master's degree, she married and reared a family in Salt Lake City. After her children were older, she taught art at West and Park City high schools.
In the early 1990s, she started painting. Then, after more than 20 years of marriage, she and her husband divorced. That threw her life open to new possibilities.
She accompanied Lake and Susan Gallacher, another Salt Lake City artist who now owns a getaway home and studio in Spring City, on several painting trips there. Once when the artists had their easels set up outside, Dean Allred, a sheep rancher and descendant of the town's founding family, stopped to chat. He invited the artists to stay at a vacant, one-room house on his ranch. Budd accepted the offer.
Budd and Allred became friends. One day, he telephoned her in Salt Lake and said, "Come down. I want to take you to the desert." Budd accompanied Allred on a transforming, two-day trip into the San Rafael Swell. She didn't know it, but Allred had cancer. (He has since died.) He was taking the trip to say goodbye to ranching and hunting chronies throughout the region. Besides introducing Budd to his friends, he took her to a wild horse herd and showed her huge panels of rock art.
After the trip, Allred told her, "You want to live someplace like this. This is the good life. In a place like this, the cows make your living for you."
"His point was, you have time to live," says Budd. "That's why I moved here, not because it was an art community. But having painted here and knowing a couple of people made it easier."
Lately, Budd has been painting modernistic figures, self-portraits and pictures from mirror images. While she sells paintings through Brushworks Gallery in Salt Lake City as well as privately, she chooses not to market as actively as some Spring City artists. She supports herself primarily by working full-time at a local middle school. "I like not having to sell because it gives me the freedom to experiment," she says.
Nonetheless, she is intensely dedicated to her art. She comes home from work, takes a 15-minute break, goes upstairs to her studio, and "starts right into it." She paints five hours most days.
Freyer, who arrived just recently in Spring City, is a generation behind the Bennions, Lake and Budd. He completed his master of fine arts degree at BYU in 1995. During his master's program, he bonded with several fellow graduate students, including Michael Workman, another Spring City artist who is rising into national prominence.
While Workman is painting in the San Juan Islands in Washington, Freyer, his wife, Terresa, and their three children, are living in the Workman house, a new home with pioneer architectural flourishes. There is a separate studio building on the property. The Freyers have made an offer on land just outside Spring City and plan to start building their own home when the Workmans return.
Between his bachelor's and master's degrees, Freyer lived in New York City and broke into the freelance illustration market. He continues to have an active illustration business. An agent in Dayton, Ohio, helps line up jobs.
He was one of six artists who collaborated on murals for the LDS Temple in Nauvoo. Currently, the BYU Museum of Art is hosting an exhibit of paintings by the same artists. In mid-April, Freyer was absorbed with producing works for the exhibit.
About a year ago, Workman and other BYU friends took him on a marketing trip to Santa Fe, N.M. The Munson Gallery, one of the most established in Santa Fe, offered to represent him. Representatives of the Howard Manville Gallery of Kirkland, Wash., saw his paintings in Santa Fe and also offered to sell his work.
With all those commitments, being an artist is a "very, very full-time job," he says. "I've been working until 10 or 11 at night for weeks now." He says when the pressure gets to him, or he feels blocked, "I might go out, feed the horses, take a walk, and come back with a fresher view and start painting again."
As more artists have converged on Spring City, social and artistic interchange and collaboration have increased. Every other Wednesday evening, several Spring City and Sanpete artists, including Lee Bennion and Budd, gather at the Central Utah Art Center in Ephraim, chip in $5 each to pay a model, and have a figure-drawing session. "There's some pretty lively conversation," says Budd. "It's fun."
Far from being threatened by new artists moving in, Joe Bennion views them as resources to build Spring City's reputation as a center for superior art. "We could use more!" he says.
E-MAIL: sdean@manti.com