Al Denyer, “Geograph VIII,” oil pastel on black paper.

Visual artists are not like musicians. A musician will practice making sounds every day. She may tell you that if she misses even one day, she can hear the difference; that after two days, her colleagues can hear it; and after three days, the audience will know it. Most artists, on the other hand, make only the marks they need to represent the day’s subjects, and may not draw or paint for days at a time. Instead of practicing, or for that matter exploring what they can render, they may focus on the search for subjects, whether naturally occurring or human-made scenes. Perhaps a lake, or the dry bed of a dying lake.

Artist and University of Utah professor Al Denyer takes a different approach, primarily concerning herself with a single artistic process. If that sounds limited, it’s not, because her focus is on the transformation essential to all art. We live in a world with three dimensions, which we evolved to perceive through an image on a two-dimensional sense organ—the retina of the eye. One of the earliest tasks of the developing brain is to learn how to read—and so perceive—space, location and other attributes of remote objects that appear in the resulting optical pattern.

A consequence of this is that it’s natural and easy for almost anyone to project the dimensions of depth back into the flat image of a work of art, and so see a vivid, round object in a flat drawing. What is hard, however, is to convert the round world we see into that flat image. This is what makes drawing so challenging for the majority of us who are not artists. Denyer is fascinated by the presumably infinite possible variations of this process—how we turn what we see into a drawing and how the way it’s drawn affects how we imagine the subject of the drawing as a 3-D image. Her preferred subject is the topography of the land—its mountains, canyons, rivers, and lakes—but she uses them to explore the marks she can make and what sort of impressions they produce in the viewer of her landscapes.

Installation view of Shifting Terrain: Mapping Place by Al Denyer at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, featuring large oil pastel drawings that explore the perception of depth and landscape through intricate contour lines.

Shifting Terrain; Mapping Place is Denyer’s current exhibition in the Projects Gallery at UMOCA. These dauntingly large, white oil pastel drawings on black paper utilize the conventions of contour drawing to produce surfaces that seem to undulate before the eye. In a sense, they can be seen as a response to her colleague, Edward Bateman, who has recently shown quite a few 3-D printed images of similar geological features. It’s Denyer’s contention that while a 3-D copy of, let’s say, a mountain, is an unambiguous model of that formation, it remains worthwhile to have drawings of such features that require and allow some mental effort to interpret. She might argue that looking at the model creates a failure-proof impression of such an object, while the drawing calls attention to the work of the imagination in translating a drawing into an impression of the object it means to show us.

Taking her argument further by looking back at her earlier works, the point can be made that her drawings give her the choice of either a vertical view or a horizontal one. The vertical view, looking straight down as is done with a map, collapses the height of the subject in order to accurately reproduce the distribution of its features on the land. On the other hand, the horizontal images she has shown recently, including a spectacular image of Little Cottonwood Canyon as might be seen by a bird or from an airplane, dispense with information about the location of features in order to give a sense of how they create an overall feeling of grandeur. It could be argued that a complete set of all this data, such as a model, denies the artist the opportunity to choose which of these characteristics to emphasize.

The curator’s statement that accompanies Shifting Terrain; Mapping Place focuses on the possibility of errors in the drawing creating a false image and so an erroneous sense of place that can be contrasted with the reality it misrepresents. That may be true, but it hardly seems necessary to postulate a viewer with sufficient knowledge to see when a drawing is inaccurate. We know that different histories create different earthly shapes, that Mt. Olympus is very different from Mt. Timpanogos, even though both are part of the same set of knolls. Being able to place two, three or even eight different landscape shapes side by side and dwell among any number of them is a massage for the eye and mind. In the past, Al Denyer has shown real places as they look using various systems of representation. That’s one of the things artists can do. Here she breaks down land shapes of her own designation, real things masquerading as optical abstractions, then coming back again as images of reality. This is one of the major reasons why we have art—to connect events in the world to those that take place in our own heads.

Al Denyer, “Geograph VII,” oil pastel on black paper.

Al Denyer: Shifting Terrain; Mapping Place, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, through Jan. 3, 2026.

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.