1975 Watercolor Dave's House Farmhouse Landscape Painting by Sean Toomey

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Vintage 1975 watercolor on paper painting titled "Dave's House" by Dean Toomy, showing a country cabin nestled among hills and … Read more Vintage 1975 watercolor on paper painting titled "Dave's House" by Dean Toomy, showing a country cabin nestled among hills and early autumn trees. Framed in a plain wood beveled frame.

Former Utah Symphony | Opera marketing and communications director Sean Toomey's first artistic love is watercolors.

He had been painting since he was 12 while growing up in New Jersey.

"I used to paint along with a painter who was on PBS in the late 1960s," he said. "My folks encouraged me and got me in touch with a local New Jersey artist whom I worked with for a couple of years."

Watercolors, said Toomey, was the only visual art form that he has ever done.

"I never tried anything else, "he said. "I tend to see the world in watercolors. So that's always what I've been drawn to."

Toomey said watercolor painting is challenging because they medium doesn't "allow you to just paint by numbers."

"You kind of have to go with the flow and stay ahead of the crazy things the watercolors do when they're on the paper."

While Toomey's works have been exhibited before in group shows, he will have his first solo watercolor exhibit at the Salt Lake Main Library from Feb. 6-March 26.

The artist grew up on the New Jersey shore and loved the way the sky and horizon made two distinct lines on the paper. When he moved to Utah in 1972, Toomey noticed the same visual dynamic.

"In funny ways, the Utah desert scape is a lot like the Jersey shore where I grew up," Toomey said during an interview with the Deseret News.

"One of the reasons it's so similar is that there is that big horizon line when you're out in the west desert and you can see forever."

After leaving the Utah Symphony | Opera in 2007, Toomey got back into painting and, once again, went after capturing those broad horizons on paper.

"I really love how the light plays on the landscape," he said. "Top half of the image is all sky and the bottom half is often desert, sand or mud and sometimes water. You've got a duality between sky and landscape, and I really love the way the light plays on the land.

"I also like the way that various climate conditions affect the way the land looks. You get blue sky or you get clouds and things like that. In my paintings, I try not to only capture the place, but the sense of time.""

A unique aspect of capturing images of Utah's western desert is the fact that the scenes are stark, Toomey said.

"And so it's really fun to capture that with watercolors," he said. "Sometimes it doesn't look like a surface that people will recognize as normal ground. It's like pavement or mud that's cracking. And the Salt Flats are interesting."

Toomey usually homes in on the natural aspect of the scenes, but sometimes he captures a bit of human presence in his works.

"The most that ever gets into my works is maybe a tire track or a fence line," he said. "But I really love the starkness.

"The conditions are very harsh. There is salt in the soil or it's very dry, and it's challenging to capture the way the plants are clinging to get the most from the little water there, and protect themselves from the sun.

"It's not a landscape that people see a lot — they tend to go to the mountains and the national parks,"" he said. ""But it's part of our heritage, and people do relate to it even though it's not familiar, but it's a collection of images from Utah that people see when traveling through to California. I'm hoping the people will resonate with the images and appreciate what we have here. We've got so much with the mountains and the red-rock country, and this is yet another dimension to our great state.

By using free brush strokes, Toomey shies away from preliminary drawings when creating his work.

"I try, where possible, to abstract the images a little bit, so when you're looking close it looks chaotic — but standing back, it all comes together"

Dimensions:
28.25" x 1.5" x 21" / Sans Frame - 20.25" x 12.5" (Width x Depth x Height) See less