Utah artist Ella Peacock—fiercely independent and idiosyncratic in the manner of Georgia O’Keeffe, to whom she is sometimes compared—painted the desert landscape and rural setting around her Spring City home in purposeful isolation, rendering her subject matter in a subtle tonalist style.

Kathryn Abajian was immediately drawn to the painter, then eighty-six-years-old, and she found in Peacock a remarkable role model for a life of voluntary simplicity, devotion to work, and dedication to an uncompromising artistic vision. But Abajian also found that in her search to understand Peacock she was seeking to know herself. First Sight of the Desert ultimately blends the multiple colors of two women’s lives onto a single canvas, reveling in brush strokes that draw beauty from even the simplest of subjects.

The University of Utah Press
Utah Art/Memoir
$21.95
ISBN 0-87480-781-6

Illustrations in First Sight of the Desert from the collection of Joe and Lee Bennion

Being Demolished

Fairview Flour Mill

Mt. Peacock

First Sight of the Desert