Windsor Utley

Windsor Utley
Windsor Utley was an accomplished musician and artist, with a career spanning 40 years. Utley was professionally trained as a flutist when he began to paint “oils, temperas, and water colors – [which] immediately reflect his musical sense. They breathe movement and mix harmony with discord as surely as the contemporary composer does in his score.” Throughout his career, Utley lived and worked in California and Washington, finding an “expression for [his] creative force” in art but also keeping his love for music alive. Utley traveled to and lived in many places, teaching himself how to combine his music and artwork.
Born in Los Angeles in 1920, Windsor Utley grew up between his birthplace and Laguna Beach, CA. He began studying the flute at age nine and set his sights on a career in music. Utley won awards throughout his time in preparatory school and continued his musical studies into the 1930s and his college years at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), University of Southern California (USC), and Pomona College. While in school, Utley took some art classes, studying architecture for a while but ultimately majoring in music. However, this introduction to visual art at the age of 19 began his lifelong love of art and painting.
Utley arrived in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1940s, as a flutist with the Tacoma Symphony. It was in Washington that he took his painting from a casual interest to a serious hobby. Utley was classified as a conscientious objector during World War II, and completed his civilian public service duties as a cook at Fort Steilacoom’s Western State Hospital for the mentally ill. Utley began his service at the Cascade Locks in Oregon but requested a transfer to Washington. During this time, Utley painted portraits of the hospital’s patients and staff, among other subjects, which allowed him to practice and refine his painting skills.
By 1943, Utley had been teaching himself how to paint for a few years but he decided he needed a second opinion of his work:
I had been painting for [some] time, and had a number of canvases, I wanted some instruction and some help in my work and some criticism. And so I thought, well, maybe I’d get to the Seattle Art Museum and ask them if someone there might be of interest, and so I packed up my canvases and watercolors and drawings and went on to the museum.
It was at the Seattle Art Museum that Utley met Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves, and Mark Tobey. Tobey, in particular, became a mentor for the aspiring artist. Utley never took a formal class with Tobey but he often checked in with him to hear critiques on his latest paintings. After meeting these Northwest masters, Utley entered and was accepted into the 1944 Annual Exhibition of Northwest Artists at the Seattle Art Museum and later that year won first prize in the Tacoma Watercolor Exhibit.
Utley married Josephine Lewis in 1945, and the couple moved to New York. There, Utley continued to play the flute and had the opportunity to study with the first flutist of the New York Philharmonic and was later chosen to play in the National Orchestra Association. He continued to paint and worked at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (now known as the Guggenheim Museum).
At this point in his artistic career, Utley was increasingly “under the influence of the painter, Kandinsky, and since that time applied himself consistently to the non-objective approach of excluding all concrete reality in a painting.” Like Kandinsky, Utley had a very cerebral approach to painting, focusing on colors and lines and how they could work together to create something new. Utley used his background as a musician to influence his work. He once wrote:
I have quite consciously striven to attain a visual counterpoint of form and lines with some of the rhythm, the flow, and interlacing that one finds in music…to achieve motion in space…the visual counterpart of a Bach fugue or a Beethoven string quartet”.
His music was always a part of his artwork, which Tobey and other mentors supported from the very beginning.
As melodies move through time, Utley strove to keep the viewer’s eye moving through his paintings. Using this technique, he felt “that he [was] able to transmit more as a painter because of his musical background. Rhythm is one of the keynotes of his art, which relies heavily on linear movement. Swirling, flowing lines pass through one another in contrapuntal fashion…forms merge and are lost in an interplay of double imagery.”
Utley’s style and experiences opened new doors for him, leading him back to Seattle in 1947. He taught art at the Helen Bush School and Cornish College of the Arts, where he later became head of the art department. He continued to informally study under Mark Tobey, often meeting him to play his flute while Tobey played the piano.
Utley traveled throughout the United States, specifically along the West Coast and lived in California, Washington, and British Columbia. Utley also spent two years in Italy, living and working in Siena and Florence. He was drawn to these cities because of their history and art, and devoted his time there to painting and exploring ancient civilizations and cultures. He continued to move between California and Washington throughout the 1980s, eventually retiring to Seattle in 1987. He opened Utley’s Art Galleries and Studio to accompany galleries he had opened in Laguna Beach and Sidney, British Columbia.
Utley’s later artwork “could be loosely called expressionistic in quality, portraying the inner feeling and mood of things as opposed to a more tangible and realistic approach. It is an intensely personal kind of art, imaginative and subtle…often fanciful and dream like in quality.” From the 1950s until the 1980s, his work ranged between non-objective and figural. His figural paintings often featured sea, rocks, California landscape, desert, and Italian themes. His wife, Josephine, recalled his love of painting Lake Union “in every conceivable light, in fog and mist and brilliant daylight” and being able to share his work with others.
Utley had various solo and group shows throughout his career in galleries and museums across the United States, including the following Seattle galleries: the Foster/White Gallery, the Otto Seligman Gallery, and the Henry Art Gallery. He died in April 1989 after a long battle with cancer but his extensive career is represented in the permanent collections of the Seattle Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, VA, and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT. Throughout his career, Utley won multiple honorable mentions in the Seattle Art Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Northwest Artists. Utley’s work shows audiences what is possible when music and art come together on a canvas. Utley never forgot his first love of playing the flute when he decided to pursue a career as an artist; instead his music became an inextricable part of his artwork.


-Annika Firn, Curatorial Intern, 2014