Aaron Moffet likes to go garage-saling occasionally. Usually, he is just looking for a good book to read or maybe a toy car for his young son. But in the back of his mind are the urban legends of finding an art treasure being sold for a pittance. Maybe a Maynard Dixon sketch or an unknown Minerva Teichert.

Moffett was thinking just this as he went trolling the streets of east side Salt Lake City last fall. But instead of finding a lost painting, Moffett rediscovered an artist.

Moffett was traveling the Harvard/Yale area of Salt Lake when he stopped at a home where Ron Andrews was manning his garage sale. After looking through some furniture that was for sale, Moffett asked Andrews if, by chance, he had any artwork. Andrews responded by saying, “Yeah, I’ve got a whole house full of paintings, but no one ever gets to see them.” Andrews peeked in the house and called to his wife, “Karen, can this fellow come see your paintings?”

Moffett was suddenly hesitant, wondering what he had gotten himself into. Would he be stepping in to look at the work of some Sunday painter? Karen Andrews came to the door, looked Moffett over and let him in. He was bowled over. “I thought ‘Wow, these are great,'” Moffett says. He came back with his wife to take a look. “I knew we’d like one for ourselves, if we could afford it, and I knew that there would be a market for Karen’s work.”

To Moffett’s delight, Karen Andrews was no Sunday painter. For almost twenty years during the seventies and eighties she had painted and exhibited professionally in Utah. She had shown at the Springville Museum, the Salt Lake Art Center, the Art Barn and the Utah Arts Council’s state shows, where she received a purchase award, an honorable mention, and was selected for a number of traveling exhibitions. George Dibble had written about her a number of times in the Salt Lake Tribune.

All was going well. In March of 1985 she was even given a One Woman show at Sylvester’s in Salt Lake City.

But then, abruptly, she stopped exhibiting. She basically disappeared. When Moffett came knocking on her door last fall, she had not shown things publicly for almost twenty years.

When Moffett, who is a board member of Artists of Utah and has an avid interest in the visual arts, discovered Andrews was not exhibiting her work, he was eager to see it get into the public view. With her permission, he began asking around, trying to find the best place for her to show. He introduced Andrews to Pam O’Mara, owner of Utah Artist Hands Gallery . O’Mara jumped at the chance to begin showing Andrews’ pieces.

“When I first saw Karen’s work,” O’Mara says, “I was excited because it was so unique. It feels like she paints with a lot of emotion.” Her fondness for the artist is as strong as it is for the work. “Karen and I immediately hit it off. I’ve enjoyed knowing her immensely.”

Andrews is equally grateful to have met O’Mara. “I really think the world of Pam. It seems like back when I was showing people didn’t treat artists with respect the way she treats her artists. And I think that’s really important.”

The issue of how she and her work are treated is important to Andrews because it is central to the reason she stopped exhibiting twenty years ago. While her One Woman exhibition at Sylvesters was up, an artist acquaintance of Andrews came to the gallery one day along with his girlfriend. The girlfriend told the gallery staff she was Andrews’ cousin and was there to photograph the work.

Soon after, Andrews saw an advertisement for an exhibit at the Kimball Art Center which happened to feature the work of that particular artist acquaintance. When she went to the show, she realized that his paintings were identical to hers. He had used the same colors, employed the same design, painted the same scenes. The only difference was that he had painted in watercolor rather than oils, Andrews’ medium.

Andrews was surprised and hurt. A naturally shy person, she felt her personal life had been invaded, her ideas burglarized. Then she found out that it was a good friend of hers that had suggested the artist (i.e. thief) take the pictures. “When I found out my friend was kind of behind it, it was devastating, and I thought, “Oh, I’ll never show my stuff again.'”

So, for nearly twenty years she continued painting, giving her work to friends and family but not exhibiting them publicly. Andrews does not necessarily regret her time in seclusion. “It was kind of a big relief, not showing for a while. It was good to do it on my own. My paintings got so much better.”

On the other hand, she is also happy to be exhibiting once again. O’Mara began hanging some of Andrews’ pieces last fall. “The response to her work has been really, really positive,” O’Mara says. “Most particularly her trains. Men seem to gravitate towards her trains. And people are really interested in meeting who painted these, more so than other artists.”

Which is ironic, since Andrews is by nature a shy person. “I’m more comfortable with alone time, being in isolation,” she says.

When she jokes to a friend that she’s just waiting for her ship to come in, he tells her “You’d just torpedo it out to sea.”

Andrews’ works do seem to have a very solitary quality to them. They are not lonely paintings, but they are scenes viewed by a person alone. She often paints that magical time of twilight when the sun has set but darkness has not yet taken over. She may paint the back of an old building at dusk. No figures are seen. Everyone has gone home for dinner. What is unique about her pieces is that she doesn’t seem to “show” the scene, as if it’s meant to say, “Hey, look at this.” The scenes are done for herself and the viewer is almost a voyeur into her personal moments.

She also has an affinity for night scenes, when darkness has taken over and she uses the lights of an old mill or a train yard to create her dynamic compositions. She likes the winter and night for painting — times when few people are around.

Of her painting “Night Shift” she says, “It’s people in there working and I’m just out there alone looking at the beauty of the building. The windows looked like stained glass to me.” The building in “Night Shift” was near Garfield but it has been razed since. “I had no idea it was going to be razed. I kept driving out there while I was working on it. I went out there one day and it was gone — while I was still working on it.”

Andrews was an outdoor painter for a long time, working on site for her paintings. A favorite location was a family cabin built near the Uintahs. Her father, a carpenter, and her mother (who, Karen says, called herself the first hippy) built it and even lived there for a time with no heat or electricity.

The cabin had a big influence on her development and she painted the area often. She and her husband purchased it from her parents in 1987. “It was the perfect composition of hills,” she recalls.

“A friend of mine who’s an artist says ‘I think I know where you get all the bigness from in your paintings. You walk down the yard and here are these big beautiful hills and they just zoom over you.'”

Because of her training of painting en plein air Andrews was suprised when she took a class from Earl Jones and he taught them how to paint from photographs. In the end, though, she was happy for the instruction. When she developed back problems she found it difficult to paint on site. And she has found that the studio experience fits her style better.

“When I’m starting a painting first I like to brown them in. I take a long time drawing my painting. My “New Yorks” can take me three months sometimes, just getting it the way I want it. Nothing’s perfect in nature, so when I used to paint out I might paint it and then I would turn south and see something I like and throw that in. That’s the beauty of painting, making it yours.”

Andrews has come out of hiding to show us what she has made her own. Currently in a two-woman show with M’lisa Paulsen at Utah Artist Hands she is exhibiting both old and new works. All of it is recent, however, to those outside of her intimate circle.

Andrews is very happy with the exhibition, with her meeting Moffett and O’Mara and her steps back into the art community. This year has been a time of closure and new beginnings for her.

Moffett’s encounter with Andrews could not have come at a more opportune time. Andrews was at a turning point in her life, which just needed a little nudge to get her back into the art community. The garage sale furniture which had attracted Moffett was from the Andrews’ cabin. They were in the process of selling it when they met Moffett. “I think selling the cabin was good for me. It helped me to learn to just let things go. Now I’m more comfortable with having my work out there.”

The sale of the cabin has helped pay for a new studio, which will help get more of her work “out there.” Andrews used to paint in an attic, accessible only by a pull down ladder. The space inside was tight and the descent precarious. “One time I was stepping down on the very top step. I had my hands full of dirty brushes and I thought of one I’d left behind. And so I turned, lost my footing and fell. I thought, ‘This is all over for me.'”

Luckily there were no broken bones. But the Andrews knew it was time for a new studio, especially now that Karen would be exhibiting. The studio, an addition to her home with access to her former attic space, is full of light and room. It’s a perfect place to paint, which she is eager to do.

“Painting’s just a part of my life. When I went through that devestating experience after the show I really felt it was the painting that was getting me down. But, really, I was painting too much. I was painting for shows and stuff. Even though it seemed like I was successful, it was hard for me. So really, that kick in the pants turned out to be a good experience for me. Because I really started painting for myself, purely for the joy of painting. Your paintings really start to get better when you paint that way.”

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.