I first met Harry Sellers during late winter 1968 in the upstairs bar of the Alpine Prospector Lodge. I recall the space-time perfectly because it fell after the mid-February Grenoble Winter Games uproar between Jean-Claude Killy and Karl Schranz and before their Roch Cup grudge match that played out a month later in Aspen.
Having arrived in town a week earlier with my brother McGee and good friend Gary Gowers, I had become totally smitten with Park City during my first-ever visit to the quaint old mining camp turned ski town, and, with friends from L.A. already employed at the lodge (now Grappa), it became our haunt of choice.
Harry fit the fun-loving bohemian counterculture mode perfectly a little rough at the edges and wildly curious about the universe in which he found himself. Befitting the acoustic music scene at the bar, he had a mandolin with him that he may or may not have built himself. At the time, I had yet to learn the true breadth of his interests, craftsmanship, and artistry.
In response to a query as to what he did with his time when it wasn’t taken up by music, he replied that he was an artist a painter.
Oh yeah, what kind?
“Oh, my stuff’s a lot like Grandma Moses,” he responded. For me, he would forever be that inscrutable mandolin-playing artist who painted like Grandma Moses and grinned like a Cheshire cat.
He proved to be much more, of course, even in the short term. As the evening went about continually reinventing itself, it became obvious that he was also a raconteur extraordinaire. Spinning yarns and drawing wildly un-geometric parallels came to him as naturally as breath.
The trigger for our somewhat substance-enhanced repartee that evening arrived with the first mention of the west coast of Mexico, from where I’d recently returned. Harry, too, knew the landscape like the proverbial back of his hand.
In order to properly work our way, corrupt federale by corrupt federale, through Sonora, Sinaloa, Nayarit, Jalisco, Colima, and Michoacan, however, the decibel level needed to be continually increased and maps drawn and relentlessly revised upon all available surfaces. A brown bag of truly awful mescal proved invaluable in locating our hallucinations geographically.
Incessant “gritos” notwithstanding, purposely attracting attention held very little importance for Harry. During the guitar, harmonica, and vocal set of Jeff Alexander, whom I also met for the first time that evening, Harry became attentiveness personified. Not that it was beyond him to add a tasty mandolin filler-lick to the proceedings if the muse struck and he felt it appropriate.
As years passed, during which I had taken up residence in Park City, his name came up often in conversation. Friends would alert me that the artist H. Francis Sellers was having yet another opening at the Meyer Gallery and that the “Dixon-Line” band, direct from recent triumphs at the Saber Bar in Salt Lake, would once again be providing entertainment.
Or hey, they would say, have you seen the triptych Harry painted for the entranceway to the new bank down on Kearns Boulevard? It’s huge, almost a mural. His rendering of the old pay phone at the old Juniors Tavern, currently in the Carole Fontana collection, is my all-time favorite, however.
More recently, it’s been his “miniature paintings” taking center stage. In Harry’s hands, miniatures aren’t necessarily about the size of the painting, although his are extremely small. It’s much more about the level of detail in the work. Looking at one of his miniatures through a magnifying glass reveals brushstrokes so fine that you come to believe that “nanotechnology” must have been involved.
As mentioned previously, however, among him and his peers, it’s never been all about Harry although pure magnetism was indeed a large part of his performance art. It’s the same with the rest of his tribe, a highly cultured and politically astute outfit with plenty of aesthetic sensibility to go around. They’ve come to know darkness at the edge of town when they see it. They’ve got that goin’ for ’em.
Well, they’re going to need that facility in spades now that Harry has gone gently into that good night. Their world is left in a lurch, not to mention a big hurt. Harry Sellers was singular! They don’t make that model anymore. They’ll get through it, but for a spell there will be heavy hearts down at Juniors Tavern, the San Rafael Swell, the Bertagnole ranch, and wherever else those on the lam from the ordinary choose to stake out a claim.
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social scenes for the past 40 years.