In Good Company: Douglas Fryer, David Dornan and Utah’s Legacy of Artists Teaching Artists

There is a particular kind of artistic lineage that runs through Utah. It moves through university studios and private workshops, across generations of painters, and eventually out into small towns where artists have built communities around the simple idea that making art and teaching art do not have to be separate pursuits.

That lineage is part of the story behind In Good Company, Altamira Fine Art’s exhibition pairing David Dornan and Douglas Fryer. On the surface, the two artists work in markedly different visual languages. Fryer reduces the Western landscape toward atmosphere, memory and abstraction. Dornan builds dense, energetic paintings from familiar objects, accumulated marks and the physical properties of paint itself. But their careers share something fundamental: both are accomplished professional painters who have also spent decades passing the discipline of painting forward.

In Utah, that places them within a tradition that is considerably larger than either artist.

David Dornan

Let'er Buck

40 x 45 inches

Oil on Canvas

Doulgas Fryer

Rain Over the North Valley

36 x 72 inches

Oil on Canvas

Utah’s relationship with formal art education stretches back well over a century. The University of Utah traces art instruction to a drawing course offered in 1869, with a formal art department approved in 1888 and graduate-level art education developing in the decades that followed. Brigham Young University established its Department of Art in 1920, building programs around painting, drawing and design that were explicitly intended to develop professional artists. Utah State University has likewise developed a strong studio culture, with programs in drawing and painting built around close faculty mentorship and the development of an individual artistic voice.

What makes that history particularly interesting is the degree to which Utah's teachers have also remained working artists. The studio and classroom have rarely been isolated from one another. Technique moves from professor to student, but so do less tangible lessons: how to build a professional life, how to work through failure, how to develop a personal vocabulary and, eventually, how to pass those lessons along again.

Altamira's own roster provides several examples. Landscape painter Jared Sanders, born in Kaysville, Utah, studied with Glen Edwards at Utah State University before beginning his professional career. Ben Steele came through the University of Utah and the intensive mentorship of David Dornan. Even the paths that eventually lead outside the university tend to remain connected to the culture those institutions helped establish.

David Dornan represents that passage particularly clearly.

A Utah native, Dornan earned his BFA from the University of Utah in 1976 and his MFA from Arizona State University in 1982. He returned to Utah and spent seventeen years teaching at the university level before leaving academia to pursue painting full time.

But leaving the university did not mean leaving teaching.

In Helper, Utah, Dornan, Marilou Kundmueller and fellow artist and educator Paul Davis helped establish the Helper Art Workshops, transforming an historic Main Street building into an immersive place for artists to live, work and study. Instead of separating education from professional studio life, Helper brought them together. Students worked alongside established painters, watched demonstrations, received critiques and experienced the daily discipline required to make a life in art.

The influence extended far beyond a summer workshop.

David Dornan

Scorpion Sauce

30 x 22 inches

Oil on Canvas

Altamira artist Ben Steele is perhaps the clearest example. Steele studied painting at the University of Utah and continued his education through the Helper Workshops, ultimately beginning a multi-year apprenticeship with Dornan and relocating to Helper himself. Their relationship has since evolved from teacher and student to fellow professional artists—a lineage Altamira explored directly in its 2026 Scottsdale exhibition Lineage. As Dornan put it in that exhibition, artists are products of the passage of “technique, wisdom and quality” from one generation to the next.

Steele was not the only Altamira artist to pass through Helper. A 2007 exhibition of work by Helper Workshop students included Scott Yelonek, alongside Steele and other Utah painters. The workshops were already in their twelfth year at that point and attracting students from around the country.

The impact has ultimately reached beyond individual careers. Preservation Utah has recognized the Helper Art Workshops for their role in the cultural and economic revitalization of Helper's historic district. What began as a place to teach painting became part of the infrastructure of an art community, helping turn a former coal and railroad town into one of Utah's most distinctive creative centers.

Douglas Fryer comes from another branch of Utah's artistic family tree.

Born in Salt Lake City, Fryer returned to Utah for his formal training at Brigham Young University, earning a BFA in Illustration in 1988 and an MFA in Painting and Drawing in 1995. There he studied principally with painter Bruce Hixon Smith, placing Fryer himself on the receiving end of the same sort of artist-to-artist transmission he would later continue as an instructor.

Fryer has since taught fine art and illustration at BYU, the University of Hartford, the Fashion Institute of Technology and Snow College in Ephraim, Utah. He continues to teach workshops for serious painters, including programs through Scottsdale Artists' School, and remains active in intensive artist gatherings centered as much on critique, experimentation and discussion as on technique.

That emphasis is entirely consistent with his paintings.

Fryer's landscapes are rarely straightforward descriptions of place. Forms dissolve and reorganize. Earth, sky and atmosphere begin to occupy the same visual territory. A recognizable hillside or field becomes an investigation into structure, surface, memory and perception. Teaching composition or painting technique, in Fryer's case, is inseparable from teaching an artist how to look.

His home in Spring City, Utah, places him within yet another of the state's remarkable artist communities. Painters and craftspeople have gravitated to the small Sanpete Valley town for decades, drawn to its agricultural landscape, historic architecture and quiet working environment. Fryer is part of a community there in which studio practice, preservation and cultural life continually overlap.

Douglas Fryer

Rabbit Brush

60 x 50 inches

Oil on Canvas

Placed side by side, Fryer and Dornan do not look like artists from the same school.

That is precisely the point.

Dornan's paintings are physical, layered and restless. Brushes, cans, flowers, tubes of paint and fragments of everyday life become starting points for explorations of surface and structure. Fryer's paintings are quieter and more distilled, allowing the landscape to hover somewhere between physical place and remembered experience.

Neither artist's teaching legacy is defined by producing students whose paintings resemble his own.

Instead, both have emphasized the harder task of helping painters discover how they themselves should work.

That philosophy can be seen in the diversity of artists who have emerged from Utah's programs, studios and workshops. Ben Steele's Pop-inflected trompe l'oeil looks nothing like Dornan's expressive still lifes. Scott Yelonek has developed his own contemporary approach to the Western landscape. Jared Sanders' restrained, tonalist views of barns, rivers and agricultural Utah came through a different university and a different mentor altogether.

That is the larger idea behind In Good Company.

The exhibition celebrates two individual bodies of work, but it also offers a glimpse into an artistic ecosystem that has been developing in Utah for generations—from the classrooms of Salt Lake City, Provo and Logan to the studios of Helper and Spring City.

It is a culture in which becoming an accomplished artist does not end the educational process. Artists remain students of painting throughout their careers, and many eventually become teachers themselves. Knowledge is passed forward, challenged and transformed. One generation gives the next a foundation and, ideally, enough confidence to leave it behind.

For Altamira, the results of that tradition are already hanging on our walls.