“About an hour in, you start to really relax,” Dallin Orr says in this video profile by Austin Smock. “You start to feel really connected to things. That deep sense of purpose and peace, that’s what I’m chasing every time I go out.”

For years Orr has kept up a habit of walking neighborhoods with a film camera around golden hour, looking for what he calls unique trees and unique houses, following curiosity rather than a plan. Reflection during those walks became a natural foundation for a painting practice—”art for me is observation,” he says—and painting on site, from life, is where that observation turns into work.

Orr, a Salt Lake City native, trained as an illustrator—a BFA from Utah Valley University, an MFA in illustration from the University of Hartford—and has spent nearly a decade designing and painting stained glass at Holdman Studios, where he now serves as Lead Artist. His most visible project there is a 25-foot domed stained glass skylight for the new North Capitol Building Museum at the Utah State Capitol, depicting Utah’s four major ecosystems in botanical and wildlife detail.

His plein air painting is a different, more solitary pursuit, and one he describes as an antidote to feeling creatively scattered. Planting his feet in one place and working with intention, he says, is how he builds a sense of purpose and place, community, and belonging—the things he’s seeking more of, and what drives his ongoing practice of painting his own neighborhood and the environment immediately around him.

That practice is the throughline of Wet Concrete, his current two-person show with Jake Gooch at Alma Gallery in Provo, on view through the end of August. Where Orr’s earlier work leaned toward sky and mountainside, these small-scale paintings turn toward the built environment—highway overpasses, skateparks, the concrete infrastructure that lies at the foot of our majestic moutnains. It’s the same golden-hour instinct that once sent him wandering neighborhoods with a film camera, now trained on the way that late light catches on a retaining wall or a bank of ramps and rails.

Three of Dallin Orr’s plein air sketches at Alma Gallery.

Wet Concrete: Jake Gooch & Dallin Orr, Alma Gallery, 274 W. Center Street, Provo, through August 31.

15 Bytes

UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.