Welcome to Utah and Asteroid City

SALT LAKE CITY — Millions of people — every time they drive into Utah, fly into Salt Lake City or watch one particular Wes Anderson movie, have seen his artwork, but likely few know his name.

It’s David Meikle, and many of his paintings are distinctive red rock landscapes of Utah and the Southwest.

Meikle is both a fine artist and an art director (his day job is art director of the University of Utah), so he generally collects elements — mountains, trees and clouds — with his iPhone and then back in the studio, arranges them on canvas.

“I think the, you know, official term is artistic license,” he said.

He likes to put a sense of distance, looking through layers and layers of mountaintops and decreasing color values, into his work.

“There’s a clarity that we have here,” he said.  “I’m always looking at the mountains at, you know, different times of day and looking at how far I can see and seeing what’s going on with the light.”

He also finds emotion in his subject.

“When you see a, you know, really beautiful sunset or you see, you know, the light hitting a mountain, you know, in a certain way, you know, it always just kind of grabs me,” he said.

He took to art early on.  A young Meikle would ask his father to draw a five-year-old’s favorite, a Tyrannosaurs Rex, and then, when dad’s rendition wasn’t up to the boy’s standards, draw it himself.

When Meikle was a teenager, his mom hired an after-school art teacher to teach him how to paint with acrylics.

He went on to win Utah’s Sterling Scholarship competition in art.

A series of cards inspired by the 1930s WPA artists who designed posters for the national parkscaught the attention of the Utah Office of Tourism which hired him to create seven “Welcome to Utah” signs for the highways leading into the state and one travelers see driving from the Salt Lake City Airport.

He created seven simplified images designed to communicate the best of the state while viewed at 80-ish miles an hour.

“You get that sense of what the place really is without all the extra detail,” he said.

Director Wes Anderson saw something in Meikle’s art that fit in the retro-futuristic aesthetic of the film “Asteroid City,” and hired him to paint elements sprinkled throughout the movie — a billboard, a billboard of a billboard, a painting that shares a scene on a train with Scarlett Johansson, scenery for a play within a documentary within the movie and a movie poster.

They were imagined landscapes but based on real locations in Utah.

The billboard was based on Zion Canyon. The movie poster includes a piece of Deadhorse Point, reversed.

Meikle said, even after all these years as an artist, he can’t just invent his own landscapes.

“I’ve drawn plenty of trees and clouds and mountains, but if I do it on my own, it just never looks right,” he said. “There’s something about nature, the way … it works on its own, you know, the shapes are always … so perfect and I can’t kind of replicate that.”

 

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