Doug Braithwaite | Wonders Great & Small

From grand vistas to small-town treasures, Doug Braithwaite captures Utah on canvas

By Bonnie Gangelhoff

Doug Braithwaite, Little Wonder, oil, 18 x 24.

This story was featured in the May 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art May 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

STEP INSIDE the Little Wonder Café in Richfield, UT, and one enters a bygone world. Vintage clocks hang on the walls, and comfy blue-leather booths line the perimeter. It’s a pork-chops-and-applesauce kind of place where locals convene to exchange the latest news and wash it down with a cup of joe for just $1.75. On occasion a celebrity may stop in, and the café’s owners post a funky sign afterwards at the anointed table, announcing to customers, “Stephen King sat here.”

Utah artist Doug Braithwaite has enjoyed the café on many occasions. Braithwaite is as fond of the Little Wonder as he is of the town of Rich-field, two places where time stands still. “Richfield is from another era—old buildings, very Americana, like Mayberry, USA,” he says, referring to the sleepy fictional town from The Andy Griffith Show of the 1960s. In Braithwaite’s depiction of the café, tinged with nostalgia, the artist ex-presses the charm and ambience of small-town life in Utah.

: Doug Braithwaite, Anticipation, oil, 11 x 14.

: Doug Braithwaite, Ants, oil, 40 x 20.

: Doug Braithwaite, Connections, oil, 24 x 28.

Indeed, Braithwaite has a talent for capturing what is “uniquely Utah.” His subject matter ranges from roadside cafés to the towering red rocks that loom across Zion National Park. In ANTS, for example, the artist conveys the massive scale of Utah’s legendary park and its rock formations. Four people are depicted in the piece, but the tiny figures are barely visible set against such an imposing backdrop.

Whether he’s capturing man-made wonders or natural wonders, the artist regularly crisscrosses the state with his easel, sketchbook, and cam-era in tow. “I try to see and paint the relationship between our modern life and life before all the conveniences of our world came to be,” Braithwaite says. “I love painting things I see every day and putting a time stamp on what my life is like here and now.”

Over the course of his 30-year career, Braithwaite has participated in more than 200 gallery shows and plein-air events both in his home state and around the country. But he always returns to the Ogden area where he was raised and where he still lives in the same house of his childhood years. As his career has progressed, Braithwaite has developed more of a studio approach to some of his work because the size of certain pieces he creates demands it. “I also enjoy the opportunity to explore different ways of putting paint on the canvas, and [being in] the studio [with more] time makes [that] available to me,” Braithwaite says.

: Doug Braithwaite, Ebbs & Flows, oil, 21 x 20.

: Doug Braithwaite, Ogden, Utah, oil, 18 x 37.

: Doug Braithwaite, Twinkle Twinkle, oil, 25 x 32.

When we caught up with the artist recently, he was finishing a painting for an auction at Eccles Community Art Center in Ogden’s historic district. And he was looking forward to the months ahead when he travels to an array of plein-air shows and teaches a three-day workshop at The Torrey Gallery in Torrey, UT. The gallery has represented Braithwaite since 1997, when he was a young, emerging artist. “We chose Doug back then because we could immediately see his gifts,” says gallery owner Cathy Bagley. “Our gallery sits at the gateway to Capitol Reef National Park, so we have customers from all over the country and Europe. Doug has been a consistent favorite of those who love the American West, especially the southern Utah landscape. It’s obvious in his paintings that he appreciates the rural West and life in small Utah towns where he spends time.”

BRAITHWAITE graduated from the University of Utah in 1991 with a bachelor’s degree in fine art and quickly began painting in earnest. He was married by then, and his wife Jeanette, a human resources specialist, agreed to work full time, taking on the bulk of the financial responsibilities and providing the family with health insurance. As Braithwaite says, “Jeanette supported my art, and her efforts are what made my efforts possible.”

Indeed, as Braithwaite followed his passion for art, he also was a self-described stay-at-home dad helping to raise the couple’s three children. Reflecting on his life then, he remarks how much he enjoyed the role that also included responsibilities as the family’s chief cook and gardener. He painted in his spare time both at night and on the weekends. In the early years of his career, while the children were growing up, he established a picture-framing business in his home for additional income.

: Doug Braithwaite, 31st and Washington, oil, 18 x 24.

: Doug Braithwaite, A Superior Landing, oil, 24 x 32.

: Doug Braithwaite, Generations, oil, 11 x 14.

Braithwaite’s professors and mentors at the University of Utah, including artists David Dornan, Paul Davis, and Tony Smith, offered him valuable advice early in his career. The best way to expose his work to the public, they told him, was to participate in plein-air shows as well as fundraising events such as charity art auctions. Braithwaite listened, painted, and slowly built his career based on that plan.

A “pivotal moment” in his art journey occurred in 1996 when he submitted a painting to the annual Spring Salon at the Springville Museum of Art, one of Utah’s most prestigious exhibits. “I entered a piece called TOYS AND TOOLS, a contemporary still life that represented my life at the time,” Braithwaite says. “The title is self-explanatory—pencils, pliers, and children’s stacking toys.”

The painting was juried into the show and won a top award. More importantly, Braithwaite says, it was selected as the cover image for the show’s catalog, a publication with a wide reach in Utah’s art community. Galleries soon began calling, asking to represent him. There was only one problem: Back then his studio was tucked inside a cramped shed in his backyard. A gallery owner visited one day to peruse his paintings. He told the up-and-coming artist that he loved his work but added that Braithwaite’s current “production level was not sufficient to warrant a gallery’s time.”

: Doug Braithwaite, Long-Term Effects of Gravity, oil, 16 x 20.

: Doug Braithwaite, Midnight Taco Run, oil, 9 x 12.

: Doug Braithwaite, Luminescence, oil, 16 x 20.

Undaunted, Braithwaite hatched a plan. He assembled a group of close friends and, with their help, built a studio in his backyard in six months. “The small shed was barely suitable for a lawn mower,” he says. “I knew I couldn’t produce what the gallery owner was looking for in that space.” The following year the gallery owner returned to check on Braithwaite’s progress, and the artist showed him 20 paintings. “He took them all and began selling them at breakneck speed,” he says.

TODAY Braithwaite still works in that same studio he built 25 years ago. It’s now filled with his own works as well as pieces he’s collected from friends. An old desk topped with a sheet of glass serves as his palette and mixing area. If he needs a break from the easel, there’s a leather sofa and recliner nearby.

But Braithwaite is more often out in the field. Heat, cold, snow, and bugs don’t deter him. “He is truly a plein-air painter. The weather does not discourage him,” gallery owner Cathy Bagley says. “The result is that the skies in his work have a genuine, honest appearance whether overcast or full of light. His brush strokes are crisp, and that translates into his portrayal of the strength and depth of the huge sandstone formations in our canyon country.”

: Doug Braithwaite, Salt Plant, oil, 12 x 16.

: Doug Braithwaite, Not My First Rodeo, oil, 30 x 40.

: Doug Braithwaite, Sprinkles, oil, 40 x 42.

When it comes to brush strokes, it’s often said that they are an artist’s fingerprints. Braithwaite admits that they occupy a key part of his imagination during the creative process. Much careful thought unfolds stroke by stroke, he says. In the painting OGDEN, UTAH, for example, he depicts a quiet Sunday morning on a city street looking north towards the Wasatch range. View the painting up close and you’ll find dozens of bold strokes—a dot of green, a slash of red, a spot of orange, all coming together to form an abstract pattern. Step back 6 feet from the work, though, and those individual strokes now suggest a stop sign, a traffic light, or taillights.

“I see the perfect brush stroke in my head. And then I try to figure out how to create it,” Braithwaite says. “I think about what has to be on the canvas first in order to make the perfect brush stroke work. Thin, dark paint goes down first, then medium-thick paint, and then come the highlights, the thickest paint. It’s like building a house. You build the skeleton first, then you cover that, and then you decorate it. I want people to see the brush strokes and how they come together to make the painting almost photorealistic from a distance.”

Braithwaite says that creating a painting is also akin to composing and playing music. As a visual maestro, he considers rhythm, tempo, tone, pitch, and interpretation in bringing a piece together. “Painting is a religious experience in the sense that I commune with the world by giving it my full attention. Every stroke must be in a certain key with perfect pitch and touch,” Braithwaite says. “The visual landscape stirs my soul in ways I can only hope to express.”

representation
The Torrey Gallery, Torrey, UT; Illume Gallery of Fine Art, St. George, UT; Terzian Gallery, Park City, UT; Braithwaite Fine Art & Custom Frame, Sunset, UT.