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.
Since 1991, four of the works they photographed have been lost or partly destroyed, "mostly through vandalism and gunshots." Also, people try to chip the images off rock walls, or scratch their names into ancient panels.
Many of the images are under little protective ledges on cliff walls, he added. The artists realized that if the images were to last, they had to be where rain would not lash them too badly.
In the Great Gallery, the differing techniques can be tied to rock art as far as 60 miles away. Sucec speculates artists would travel there to add their works to the cliffs.
He recalls his first glimpse of Barrier Canyon art. In 1976, he was driving in the San Rafael Swell at night, rounded a curve, and "my headlights hit Buckhorn Wash," a famous site east of Castle Dale, Emery County.
"I just could not believe it," he said. He stopped there and camped the night near the panel.
Law remembers Sucec getting him to hike into Horseshoe Canyon with him, where the giant figures of the Great Gallery are. "It was quite a way to begin," he said. Since then, Law and Sucec have hauled 5 X 7 and 4 X 5 cameras to Barrier Canyon sites, trying to save the art.
The paintings and other markings seem to express an ancient people's "spiritual culture and their tradition," Law said. They may show creation stories that helped sustain them.
"As I talk to Native Americans, they talk about how holy these things are to them," he said.
"I almost feel like I'm going to sanctuary a lot of time, when I go there." Law added that he tries to make his photographs with reverence.
Sucec is to deliver a paper on the Great Gallery's "Holy Ghost" figure during the annual symposium of the Utah Rock Art Research Association, to be held in Vernal Oct. 6-9.
Meanwhile, the two are trying to supplement the grants they've been getting with new funding sources. Sucec says anyone who is interested in contributing to their nonprofit group, the BCS (for Barrier Canyon Style) Project, can contact him at davids@networld.com.
E-mail: bau@desnews.com