Abigale Palmer is a representational oil painter working in landscape, the figure and everyday life, reaching for the sublime through saturated, unworldly color. Based in Provo, Utah, she holds degrees from Brigham Young University and the University of Utah and has studied independently with Zoey Frank and Caitlin Winner.
Her painting Color in the Climb is in the State of Utah Art Collection, and her 15-painting installation, anchored by the 25-foot Dare Mighty Things (2025), hangs at Utah State University. She was the 2024 artist in residence at Sundance Mountain Resort. Her plein air work has won awards in Utah County and Spring City. She served on the artist panel for the Maynard Dixon exhibition at the BYU Museum of Art.
Her work has been profiled in 15 Bytes and by historian Richard Bushman, who writes that her landscapes “suggest the sublimity of nature—its threatening grandeur.” She is represented by Elliott Fouts Gallery in Sacramento, David Ericson Fine Art in Salt Lake City and New Vision Art in Orem.
Her landscapes “suggest the sublimity of nature—its threatening grandeur.”
Statement
The thread running through all of my work is the sublime, from the luminous to the terrifying. I reach it through saturated color and deliberate flatness rather than darkness and scale. Flatness lifts a scene out of ordinary reality, so color carries the feeling instead of describing what is there. Even a still life can be saturated enough to unsettle.
I paint from life whenever I can. Working outdoors has taught me to paint inside changing light, where a color exists for minutes and has to be caught or lost. My palette is high-key and high-chroma, influenced by Joaquín Sorolla’s sunlight and by the saturated color of Richard Diebenkorn, Wayne Thiebaud and Mark Rothko. I push color past what the eye reports, toward unworldly color combinations that still read as true.
I also borrow from graphic design. Flattened shapes, strong silhouettes and deliberate edges sit beside thick, fast strokes that carry the movement of a wave or a running child, so a painting holds together from across a room and rewards a closer look. Painting Dare Mighty Things, a 25-foot installation, taught me how color behaves at the scale of a room.
For years my landscapes have left out the human figure that landscape painting traditionally offers, so the viewer meets the land directly. My current work brings the figure back, to the very edge of the sublime.