JIM C. NORTON 1953 -0000 Born in Price, Utah, Jim Norton was raised in Lyman, Wyoming, where he gained a working knowledge of ranch life by helping friends with cutting and drying hay, and branding and feeding cattle. Though as a child he watched his grandfather, Earl Fausett, paint in his basement studio, and two of his cousins, Lynn and Dean Fausett, would become noteworthy professional artists, as Norton tells it, there wasn’t much in his childhood that would have led anyone to believe he would become an artist. Instead, he spent most of his time hunting, fishing, and hiking, when he wasn’t busy honing his football and basketball skills. “I even had an offer to go play football at Dartmouth, but that was too far east,” he says.
a few hours in the evenings and on weekends to developing his skills as a painter was not enough and he took a major leap of faith, leaving his job to devote himself full-time to painting. “I knew from playing sports that if you don’t put in the hours practicing, you’ll never make it.” When he broke the news to his wife, “She said, ‘I’ll give you five years.’ And that was it,” says Norton.
After graduating from high school, Norton spent two years as a Mormon missionary in Australia. Upon his return from Australia he decided to study art, taking classes at Western Wyoming Community College, where his art teacher, recognizing his talent, urged him to transfer to Brigham Young University to continue his art studies. During his two-and-half-year tenure at BYU he says, “I got my early foundations in art.”
“It’s the light and dark and the colors and reflections that I see and want to paint,” he says. “I’ll lay out on a lawn chair and watch the clouds billowing over me, and I don’t go, ‘Oh, that’s beautiful!’ I think, ‘That’s cobalt blue with a touch of red.’ I don’t really care if it’s a stream or a mountain or a rock. It all starts more abstractly. Color and values and light can be beautiful just in themselves.”
Working from his home studio in Santaquin, Utah and his cabin studio on 20 acres in Uinta Mountains, Norton relies on real-life cowboys and horses and his collection of authentic Plains Indian costumes to inform his typically large-scale paintings.
As grand as his paintings are however, Norton is modest about his success and grateful for the blessings that have been his. “I’m a religious man,” he says. “I don’t create the things I paint. They’re just there.”
Norton’s tenure at BYU ended when he decided to leave to take a job as a supermarket representative with a food broker, to start “… doing [his] own study work,” and paint in his spare time. However, after several years, Norton realized that devoting only
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