Ned Young, “After a Spring Rain,” 25×20 in.

Brigham City native and Cache Valley enthusiast Ned Young is an artist surrounded by superlatives, the way redwinged blackbirds circle around one of his sublime barns. Although his realism surpasses photography and his disappearing brushwork ranks with that of Vermeer, what may be mentioned first and most often is the physical presence of light in his landscapes. “You can tell it’s Utah” is a frequent comment, though in truth he is a painter who travels frequently and paints what appeals to him wherever he finds it.

The concrete-drum silo that forms the centerpiece of “Thunder and Redwings” casts scissor-sharp shadows on the crumbling barn behind it, yet where the sky becomes visible further back a storm darkens it. At this point, viewers may hear its threatening rumble in their mind’s ear. Contrasting, even conflicting, weather seen from a single vantage point displays the same visual acuity as does the accuracy of his collection of meticulously captured houses, barns, hay bales, and churches, but also trees, fields, roads: it’s clear that he sees nature and its human counterpoints as equal subjects of intrigue, equal players in the visible world.

Young’s has not exactly been the typical career arc for a painter. We know this because he can recount every crucial step, from his first art lessons at five years, an age when many children are not yet forming permanent memories, to his primary influences that, once again, went under the radar of most of his contemporaries. (Jackson Pollock studied under Thomas Hart Benton, but he famously couldn’t unlearn his lessons fast enough.) Young saw the illustrations that filled his childhood magazines, and books like Treasure Island and Moby Dick, and came away with real respect for Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, and Winslow Homer. He travelled to Brandywine, met Andrew Wyeth, and later exhibited in the land of his heroes. As the cliché goes, it’s harder to name an artist from the golden age of illustration he doesn’t know than one he absorbed. Yet the oddest and most remarkable clue, perhaps a key to his success, is that his parents didn’t just approve of his avocation; it was they who suggested to him that art might well be his natural choice.

David Ericson is so sure of what his audience should see first that he often puts a work outside the door to his gallery, where it beckons them in. “First Light” is just inside—since it’s going on winter—but the principle applies. Here the sun, just out of sight in a cloudless sky, illuminates the hair on a grazing horse and lights its contours the way a nimbus might a painted saint. Leave it to Young to also spot its visual echo on the roof of the storage bin that repeats the animal’s shape. What elevates this composition to art is the way the absolutely convincing reality of the rest of the scene causes the horse to come forward and seem cut out, as if in a collage of light.

Ned Young, “First Light,” 15×20 in.

Ned Young, “Rustle of Poplar Leaves,” watercolor

It is, of course, his characteristic, sharp awareness, and from it the sense we get that nothing escapes him, that makes the world within the four boundaries that frame his version, his account of the world, so complete. It seems as if he never learned to edit what he encounters, but must include every blade of grass, wizened timber, and distant bird. But look closer and consider, for example, how he chooses whether to paint in watercolor or, if a bodied paint, whether to use oils or acrylics. In “Rustle of Poplar Leaves,” for example, another work that uses light to invoke the sounds of nature, those shadows across the road have the transparency of watercolor, a conclusion advanced by the mountains and clouds, though they might be missed at first, given the brilliant sunlight streaming across the foreground. Contrast that with the background of “Resting in the Sun.” The sun-cracked paint peeling off the splitting boards almost certainly required an opaque paint, with the choice between oil and acrylic decided on how fast he could paint it, given their vastly different drying times.

There was a time when a religious picture was just that and a landscape something else, but today ideas come in layers, the same as paint. In “Waking Blackbirds,” the elaborate barn yields the title to the energetic activity on the ridge behind. However, the artist will tell you that it’s the corner of the fence he wanted to call attention to, which he had seen before from the other side, where he visited several ancestors’ graves. It may never be explained how this happens, but the choice of subjects, the close focus, the colors, and some mysterious quality combine synergistically to mean more than themselves in a way we cannot explain, but feel powerfully.

Ned Young, “Walking Blackbirds”

Ned Young, David Ericson Fine Art, Salt Lake City, through Dec. 19.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.