Pilar Pobil, an acclaimed Utah painter who captured life in vibrant colors and inspired generations of artists as a mentor and friend, has died.
She was 98.
Pobil died Wednesday, according to Kathryn Lindquist, vice president of the Pilar Pobil Legacy Foundation, the Salt Lake City arts nonprofit named for her.
“When I started doing my artwork, the world opened up for me,” Pobil told The Salt Lake Tribune in 1994. “I realized I had ideas. Painting makes me a bigger person, less inside myself. … Being an artist made me more full, determined and liberated.”
(Photo by John D. Linford) Utah painter Pilar Pobil's "African St. Francis."
Pobil drew inspiration for her paintings from life around her in Salt Lake City — including people she knew or shoppers she saw at the Downtown Farmers Market in Pioneer Park. The women she captured in paintings and sculpture show, in her words, “strength, energy and self-possession.”
“I feel that I know personally each of the people who appear in my works,” Pobil told Tribune art critic George Dibble in 1986. “The children who trip lightly down the path, the person quietly reading a book with calm relaxation, the eager groups at a carnival, the neighbors who talk across the back fence — each are known to me.”
The core of her expressionist style, though, was inspired by Spain, where she was born, and Mexico, where she had a seaside second home for 30 years.
“A lot comes from Spain and a lot comes from Mexico,” Pobil told The Tribune in a 2000 interview. “I love the Mexican way. [The people] are wonderful in the way they have no inhibitions. They are not afraid.”
A self-taught artist, Pobil painted in watercolor, oils and acrylics — sometimes taking the paint past the canvas and onto the frames. At times, she painted on shoes, boots, furniture, doors and parts of houses. She sculpted clay on wood, and sewed and embroidered fabric. She wrote a memoir, “My Kitchen Table: Sketches From My Life,” in 2007 in which she collected her stories and 50 of her paintings.
Through the years, Pobil has opened her home in Salt Lake City’s Avenues neighborhood to schoolchildren, letting them paint in her garden. She has also mentored aspiring professional artists.
(Photo by John D. Linford) Pilar Pobil said that her work "French Curves" is a study in humor. The painting is enormous, about six feet tall.
In 1995, Pobil launched an annual art exhibition, “Art in Pilar’s Garden,” to allow nonartists to meet artists in a more accessible setting than an art gallery, with food and music included. Some 300 people now attend the event over a weekend in June.
“I hope [people] come to admire art in an atmosphere of spring beauty, of conviviality and friendship, of generosity of spirit and love for what makes life worth living,” Pobil said in 2021.
The Pilar Pobil Legacy Foundation was launched to continue the garden event, and “celebrate my Spanish heritage by nurturing artists of Latino and Hispanic descent, among others,” she wrote on the foundation’s website.
Among the foundation’s programs is the Pilar Pobil Humanities Scholarship, an endowed annual scholarship given to a student transferring from Salt Lake Community College to the Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah’s College of Humanities. Recipients are often, like Pobil, women who are immigrants — first-generation college students who hold down jobs to support their families and don’t qualify for typical scholarships.
In a Facebook post Wednesday, former Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskupski wrote, “It is so heartbreaking to lose this bright light in my life. I will forever miss her smile, her laugh, her stories and her excitement over her latest creation.”
(Photo by Emma J. Dugal) This painting by Utah painter Pilar Pobil, of an Italian seaside village, was part of a 2012 exhibition, "Conversations in Culture," at the Bountiful/Davis Art Center.
Pilar Pobil was born Oct. 26, 1926, in Madrid and raised in Mallorca, Spain. According to family lore, she was 9 years old when her father, an admiral in the Spanish navy, was assassinated near the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, and the family escaped to Portugal.
The family later returned to Mallorca, where Pobil attended a convent school. She sculpted with clay in her garden, painted furniture and drew pictures.
“I always had a pencil and paper in my hands,” Pobil told The Tribune in 2000. “But at that time in Spain, women were not supposed to have careers. Our future was in the home or the convent.”
In 1956, she married Walter Smith, and the couple moved to Salt Lake City, where he was born and grew up. They had three children and were married for 43 years, until Smith’s death in 1999.
Smith inspired Pobil to return to art, she said in 2000, by suggesting she take a pottery class at Salt Lake City’s Art Barn. She then bought her own clay and started sculpting on their kitchen table. Painting soon followed, first in watercolor and then in oils.
Walter’s brother, Paul Smith, was a prominent landscape watercolorist, and Pobil spent some time working with him. “I started painting a little in his style, but then I started painting on my own,” she said. “I didn’t want to be influenced by anyone else. I wanted to develop on my own terms.”
In February 2000, a few months after Smith’s death, Pobil dedicated a gallery show at Park City’s Kimball Art Center to him.
(Photo by John D. Linford) Much of painter Pilar Pobil's work, like this one from 2005, is images of her native Spain or coastal Mexico.
“He encouraged me so much. He also was a wonderful critic. He never let me get away with anything,” Pobil said at the time. “Eventually, he said, ‘You know, I can hardly find anything to criticize anymore.’”
A recurring theme in Pobil’s still lifes were apples, influenced by her husband. “He once told me that nobody paints apples like [Paul] Cézanne,” she said, referring to the 19th-century French painter. “I didn’t say anything. But I started painting apples, and he liked them.”
More food, such as artichokes and pomegranates, were also favorite subjects. “I tell people I paint and then eat my subjects,” she joked.
Pobil’s works are in collections of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, the Springfield Museum of Art and the Utah Arts Council. Other works are displayed at the Governor’s Mansion, the rectory at the Cathedral of the Madeleine, the Utah Cultural Celebration Center, and the U.S. Embassy in Mauritius.
Among Pobil’s many accolades, her foundation said, was a knighthood — the Royal Order of Isabella the Catholic — awarded by King Felipe VI of Spain in 2016.
Pobil also was named one of Utah’s “15 Most Influential Artists” by the publication 15 Bytes in 2019, received the Salt Lake City Mayor’s Artist Award in 2020, and is among the prominent Utah women featured on Zions Bank’s “Utah Women 2020″ mural in downtown Salt Lake City. In February, the Utah Cultural Celebration Center in West Valley City renamed its art gallery the Pilar Pobil Celebration Gallery.
Pobil is survived by two of her children, Monica Pasqual and Maggie de Cerda. Her son, Luis Fernando Smith, died in 2020 from COVID-19.
Memorial services are pending.
