{"id":105455,"date":"2026-09-01T15:45:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T22:45:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=105455"},"modified":"2026-09-02T20:20:33","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T03:20:33","slug":"david-and-brigitte-delthony-thirty-years-in-escalante","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/david-and-brigitte-delthony-thirty-years-in-escalante\/","title":{"rendered":"David and Brigitte Delthony: An Improbable Migration, Thirty Years Later"},"content":{"rendered":"

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They bought the property on a whim. David and Brigitte Delthony were mid-career artists out of Berlin traveling through the Southwest when they stumbled across a property for sale outside the small town of Escalante, Utah. It was a former sawmill. The owner needed cash for another project, the price was right, and the Delthonys decided to buy it, though they weren’t entirely sure what they would do with it. It was, David recalls, the sort of decision \u201cyou make when you’re kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two years later, they packed their lives\u2014and much of David’s woodworking studio\u2014into two 40-foot shipping containers and moved in. That was thirty years ago.<\/p>\n

Neither had any particular connection to southern Utah. David<\/a>, born and raised on Long Island, attended Haverford College in Pennsylvania, where his interests increasingly turned toward art, ceramics, sculpture and woodworking. He spent two years in the Peace Corps in Turkey, where he also worked with village potters. After returning to New York, he began designing and building furniture before moving to West Berlin, drawn by the Bauhaus tradition and Germany’s strong craft culture. There he earned a degree in interior design from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1975 and trained as a master cabinetmaker.<\/p>\n

Brigitte<\/a> was German, born and raised in Heidelberg. She studied in Paris, Freiburg and Munich before attending the Academy of Fine Art in Berlin, where she earned her degree as an art teacher and later trained and became accredited as an art therapist. For more than 15 years, she worked as an educator and art therapist while pursuing her own work in painting and ceramics.<\/p>\n

David, meanwhile, set up shop on an old factory floor near the Berlin Wall, in a neighborhood where businesses had departed during the Cold War and artists had moved in to take advantage of inexpensive space. He began abandoning conventional rectilinear furniture and developing the biomorphic forms that became his \u201cSculptured Furniture.\u201d He also began assembling the industrial infrastructure necessary to make it, acquiring much of his heavy machinery and hand tools from junkyards and business closings around the city.<\/p>\n

By the time the Delthonys encountered the old sawmill outside Escalante, David was exhibiting at international furniture fairs in Cologne and Milan, where his one-person operation stood out among manufacturers of kitchens, sofas and other mass-produced furnishings. He describes himself as something of a \u201cunicorn\u201d there, the lone studio artist among large manufacturers.<\/p>\n

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