“I just had to go find my calling,” David Dornan says, recalling the moment he knew he needed to leave the University of Utah as a full tenured professor and devote himself entirely to painting.
That instinct didn’t lead him to New York or Santa Fe, but to Helper, Utah — a fading coal town whose empty buildings and quiet Main Street held something far more valuable: time, space, and potential. What appeared like a town in decline with dilapidated old buildings looked to Dornan like the freedom to finally paint all he wanted.
Helper in the 1990s was hollowed out, shrinking year-by-year as the coal industry was becoming more automated and families were moving on.
But back then, no one knew it yet. All he saw was a building he could afford — the old Hotel Utah — and the chance to reinvent his life. He bought the place in 1994 while still teaching, commuting from Salt Lake City.
By 1999, after 17 years on the tenure track, a single month’s painting income matched his annual university salary. That made the decision easier. “I just wasn’t going to have the time to paint as much as I wanted,” he says. So he walked away.
Marilou Kundmueller, a medical illustrator and critical care nurse at Primary Children’s Hospital, followed a year later. They married in 2000, and together imagined an art school where students could escape the rush of campus life and work all day without distractions. The idea had come to them while driving down Highway 6 to Moab. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a place off-campus where we could teach students all day long?” Dornan said. Helper became that place.
Their approach to teaching grew out of a lineage stretching back to Dornan’s own mentor, the renowned painter Alvin Gittens. Gittens believed that a true education rested not on theory but demonstration.
“Talk is cheap,” Dornan says. “A demonstration teaches more than a critique ever could.” That ethos became a defining trait of the Helper art community — hands-on, generous, built on showing rather than telling.
The next generation arrived almost without planning. Dornan never pushed his prodigy Ben toward living in Helper, but after taking five workshops one summer, Ben made his choice. He moved to Helper “totally on his own volition,” lowered his expenses, and simply declared himself an artist. A group show in Southern California sealed it: one student sold 14 paintings; Ben sold a couple and saw a path forming. Soon he and his wife became the first young family to settle in Helper as part of the emerging artist wave. Today, they own several buildings on Main Street, fulfilling Dornan’s quiet dream that artists — not developers — would secure the town’s creative core.
Helper now holds an unusual harmony: coal miners, Italian Catholics, Mormons, and liberal artists all occupying the same three-block strip. “It feels like water and oil, but somehow people appreciate each other,” Dornan says. Coal still defines part of the town’s identity — the Skyline Mine remains a massive economic engine — but the artists have added a new chapter rather than erasing the old one.
“I’m gonna make a place I don’t need a vacation from,” Dornan likes to say. Helper became that place — for him, for Marilou, for Ben and his family, and for a growing tribe of artists who saw beauty where others only saw decline.
Helper Workshops is also a co-host to the Helper En Plein Air competition, an annual painting experience adjacent to the Helper Arts Festival August 18-21. For more information or to participate contact Marilou Kundmueller at mariloukundmueller@me.com
Feature Image of David Dornan and Marilou Kundmueller. Photos by Ryanne Andrews.
