Coalition Building in Sepia

Park City's iconic old Coalition Building stands as it might have in its final days. In H. Francis Sellers' sepia-on-cream water media rendering, the colors and the grainy dry brush texture give the painting the feeling of a very old photograph. In fact it seems almost like a sepia photograph that might have been taken around the time the structure was built in 1901. The broken window panes and crumbling railings reveal the structure to be long past the time that it was the bustling lower terminal of the Silver King Mining Company's aerial tramway, though. Sellers' subtle shading gives the painting an impressive realism. "It is almost magical," Sellers one wrote, "how, with the smallest touch of the brush, things happen." These small magical things happen all over the painting: subtle beams of light coming through breaks in the roof, ragged shadows, and big billows of shrubs which could be scrub oaks. Or, they might not be shrubs at all, but smoke, a foreshadowing of the arson fire that would take the building down in July 1981. Either way, it is after 1952, when United Park City Mines Company ceased operations and halted the tramway that transported lead, zinc, and silver from the building to the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad to the smelters down in the valley. But the painting is from a time when the Coalition Building still stood as Park City's most recognizable landmark.

Friends and museums alike tend to describe Utah watercolor painter H. Francis Sellers' personality before his paintings. He was a legendary figure who friends described as fun-loving, irreverent, and larger-than-life. Born in Rock Springs, Wyoming in 1937, Sellers studied art at Brigham Young University. He was a watercolor painter with a traditional style, but he wasn't necessarily interested in traditional subject matter. While he started out painting large works, he ended up painting almost exclusively miniatures- a creative evolution born of pragmatism. Sellers wrote: "when I painted large, often I would do a thumbnail sketch. Some would be very interesting. I began to apply paint to these sketches and enjoyed the final product much more than working large." Working small was also practical for an artist who spent so much of his time on the road. He made his home in the Salt Lake Valley, though he would spend as much as half the year away from home, exploring the San Rafael Swell, helping out on dinosaur digs, getting into mischief, and gathering new tales to recount of his adventures around Utah. He was an epic storyteller. But as wonderful a character as the artist was, his paintings stand on their own. He passed away in 2011. In his day, H. Francis Sellers was both a notorious and beloved figure whose precise watercolors were highly sought after by collectors.