Once a coal miner, now a prolific painter, Helper resident Thomas Elmo Williams feels as though he has “won something great.” Between the months of May through July, Williams will be working on six large-scale panels for the lobby of the new Park City Police Department building on Park Avenue, a $40,000 commission.
“There are so many artists out there struggling and there are so many artists out there competing for everything that for me, it’s one of those feelings you can’t describe.”
Though Williams has worked as a professional artist in Utah and California for 14 years and completed several commissions for commercial buildings, , the Park City Police Facility Public Art project will be his first public art commission and one of his largest commissions to date. On his application, Williams proposed two triptychs, one composed of three panels four by five feet in dimension, the other composed of three panels three by seven feet, illuminating all aspects of Park City from its mining history to the 2002 Olympics to the daily life of Parkites young and old, two and four-legged. “I want the paintings to be a tribute to public safety, yet at the same time, represent Park City as a whole,” he wrote, adding, “Art does not exist merely to entertain. It can play a role in the improvement or our collective existence.”
His project was officially submitted by the Park City Public Art Advisory Board and approved by Park City Council at last Thursday’s Park City Council meeting at City Hall. Williams’ work rose to the top of a field of 10 artists who submitted ideas ranging from sculptural work in rock to an electric light display the request for proposals emphasized a design “authentic to the community and its surroundings,” per the City’s Public Art Plan. The plan allocates one-percent of the total cost of construction of public facilities for art.
For Park City Police staffers, Williams’ work will be familiar. Two of his canvases’ already hang in the department offices, each a painted collage of historical photographs of police officers and Old Town, miners and homes. Williams paints in a limited pallet of warm sepia tones accented occasionally with red and turquoise, affecting a romantic quality found in old photographs. He sites his influence as the American painters Thomas Hart Benton and Edward Hopper. Those who have written of his work have likened Williams to a “Modern-day WPA” or a modern Ashcan painter, a school of American realist artists based in New York City from 1908-1914 who depicted alleyways, tenements and “slum dwellers.”
Williams never went to school in painting. After 14 and a half years coal mining, he was injured in an industrial accident in Helper that resulted in a knee and hip replacement. Unable to work in coal mining, he attended Southern Utah University to study psychology and secondary education. Throughout he continued to draw. He liked to sketch fellow coal miners “just to see what he could do,” and to meditate on his long line of family members from his home state, West Virginia, who worked in factories, steel mills and mines. When Utah artist David Richie Johnson saw his work, he helped him launch his career with an exhibition at the Rio Grand Train Station, where, Williams says his show sold out.
After the tragic collapse of the Crandall Mine near Helper last summer that killed six miners, Williams helped to raise money for the families who suffered a loss. Many who worked at the mine were friends of Williams’, but more importantly, he stresses that he was moved because of the close ties made in small towns in America. “II learned at a young age, that family is more than just your immediate brothers and sisters. It encompasses a whole community of friends in small towns, you have that,” he says. “That’s what you can see on my panels and what you will see at the (Park City Police Department building.)”
Williams says his approach to his work is to research old artifacts and photographs, and to also interview local residents, some of whom, in Park City are long-time friends since Williams began coming to the Wasatch mountains in the 1970s. “You can look through all the research you want and you can gather a feeling, but for an artist to be able to put that feeling on canvas, he or she has to speak to someone who holds those feelings,” he explains.
Williams says most of the panels will be completed in Helper at the Box Car Gallery, a gallery he co-owns. The title of the pieces will be “This Historical Past and Present-Day View of Park City.”
Park City Police Chief Lloyd Evans looks forward to seeing the project in September, when the preliminary sketches are fully realized in paint. Though the chief will retire in June, he plans to return for the project’s unveiling.
“From my standpoint, what I wouldn’t want to see on our walls are sings or general information I think it’s important that it’s important that in our public facilities, we portray some visual aspect through art of our past,” he says. “I think we should be proud of where we came from and where we’re going into the future that draws visitors to be curious about how the art hooks into the building.”