This May, when residents of Alpine, Utah mourned the demolition of the town’s last remaining pioneer-era home, the Carlisle House—razed to make way for an expanding charter school—painter and sculptor Dennis Smith was among them. He grew up in this Utah County town, nestled beneath the soaring granite of Lone Peak. It wasn’t really a town, then; more like a hamlet. For the first five decades of the 20th century, Alpine’s population rarely breached 500. Children were born and raised there but, more often than not, they left as adults. In the 1960s, Smith reversed the trend when he convinced a group of Mormon artists out of BYU that the rural enclave would be the perfect place to form an art colony. It was a brief though influential experiment, explored in Nathan Florence’s film Bright Spark. Members of the colony eventually went their separate ways, but Smith has remained, painting and sculpting for more than six decades. During that stretch, the town has swelled more than tenfold, joining the now continuous stretch of Utah’s urbanized core that extends from Ogden to Springville. Smith has been there for the construction of the McMansions in the 1990s (Alpine’s 84004 zip code is one of the most expensive in the state), and he’s witnessed the arrival of the tech bros and mommy influencers in the last decade. The Alpine of his youth lives on now only in his paintings.

More than a dozen of these brightly colored gems, along with several bronze sculptures, are part of Through the Eyes of a Child, at the Utah Valley Museum of Art at Lakemount. The paintings are vibrant, high-energy celebrations charged with dynamic color and expressive brushwork. With a palette rich in saturated hues, Smith conveys a sense of movement and life, even in static images. Influences of Impressionism and Expressionism are evident in his approach, focusing on atmosphere and emotion rather than precise realism. His paintings capture the essence of small-town life and rural landscapes, transforming everyday scenes into vivid, captivating compositions.

Smith has said he painted scores of these paintings before he developed a style he was happy with. They are rooted in specific landmarks, though no attempt is made to paint them in a realistic fashion. “White Bridge,” “Evan’s Station,” “Alpine Creamery,” “Grandpa’s Silver Poplars”—each speaks of remembered adventures and poignant rendezvous. In rare episodes, Smith’s nostalgic meanderings go beyond his hometown, like the family vacation depicted in “Swimming in the Great Salt Lake.” Regardless of where they happen, the paintings retain a nostalgic air, evoking a deep connection to place, reflecting the tranquility and simplicity of a bygone era. They aren’t really about people, who appear only as small elements. They are about landscape, as an identity, as a playground—flashes of memory, landmarks and locales planted in the mind of a child in a time before GPS and helicopter parents.

Several small sculptures presented on pedestals provide 3D counterpoints to Smith’s brightly colored oils. Wander the grounds of the museum and you’ll find more examples: relatively realistic depictions—there’s a slight touch of expressionism to the clay—of late-elementary or early middle school children, laughing, playing, skipping rope. If you’ve lived in Utah for any amount of time, you’ve likely run across examples of this work, sprinkled across town centers and public spaces from one corner of the state to the next. Occasionally, a parent steps in to swing the child or hoist them on their shoulders.

At the beginning of his career, Smith was principally a sculptor, and became well-known for these figurative works. But he also created a second body of work,  a series of fantastical, multi-part assemblages of steampunk flying machines, sometimes manned by a small sculptued figure, which the artist calls “airships.” A nod to these flights of fancy can be found in the sculpted, lanky youth, arms outstretched, who welcomes visitors to the exhibition. But this second—and frankly more exciting—sculptural work is absent from the UVU exhibit. Which is a shame: they come closer to the truth of the paintings than do the bronzes.

Even if a painting might convince us that it’s a window to another world, painting, by definition, allows for transformation, offering a depiction of reality that can be skewed, softened, or reimagined. Sculpture, on the other hand, especially in the round, is more grounded—it suggests something solid, weighted, and concrete. Smith’s bronze sculptures of boys and girls, dressed in outfits evocative of the 1950s and 60s, feel rooted in a specific era. They are directly out of central casting, an idealized world of mid-century Americana. These works convey a sense of nostalgia, but the realism of the figures feels out of step with the energy and movement found in Smith’s paintings. That same energy can be found in the assemblages, which speak more directly to the imaginative flights of fancy that Smith explores in his paintings, where memory and imagination are blended into something more alive, more fluid. The sculptures, by contrast suggest a frozen ideal, a moment that feels more static than the vibrant worlds he creates on canvas.

Smith wears his nostalgia on his sleeve, especially in his paintings, where he makes sure you are aware that he is aware it is a skewed reflection—a vision of the world seen, as the exhibition title suggests, Through the Eyes of a Child. Memory, of course, is selective, and Smith’s paintings acknowledge this, embracing the imperfections of recall. His sculptures, by contrast, suggest something more fixed, untouched by time, unmarred by complexity.

Through the Eyes of A Child, UVU Museum of Art, Orem, through Sep. 21

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.