Untitled

There is something aspirational about the old hay barn in Dave Burton’s pastoral scene of a range of somewhat decrepit farm buildings under the looming grandeur of Mount Timpanogos. It’s the upward sweep of the roofline in the main building, a gentle arabesque that echoes the upward sweep and subtle peak central in the mountains beyond. Even the horizontal pattern of hay in the barn is reminiscent of the distinctive striated blockiness of the mountain. The right-most barn in the row of outbuildings repeats the pattern of shadows in the mountain range beyond. The colors, though, are contrasting, and the visibly-aged farm structures pose questions about both time and scale. But the shape of the buildings is a beautiful echo of the mountains behind them, as if the buildings have become so much a part of the landscape that they have taken on its form.

David Earl Burton was a renowned Utah-based illustrator and painter. Born in Salt Lake City in 1918, he grew up on Capitol Hill and spent most of his life in the Avenues. His talents as an artist/illustrator were recognized early in life, so much so that after being drafted into the U.S. Navy Burton was tapped to be a cartoonist in Washington, D.C., writing and illustrating the comic strip “Stalemate” for the Navy’s publication All Hands. His preferred medium was acrylic paint, which he would sometimes water down and use like watercolors. He liked to work quickly, and with acrylics he could sometimes finish a painting in a day or two. In addition to creating the fine art paintings such as those represented in the Summit County collection, Burton was a skilled professional commercial artist who had an uncanny ability to capture his subjects’ essence through caricature. He was an accomplished skier, fisherman, and golfer; a polymath who also had a passion for geology and paleontology. Dave Burton passed away in 2015. His vast body of work includes hundreds of fine art portraits, animals, illustrations, and landscapes, as well as cartoons.