Foliage artist adds color to family trees By Jana McQuay
Genealogy research, a growing nationwide trend, is fuel for local artist Saundra Diehl to paint family trees.
Saundra Diehl and her family recently moved to Park City from Long Island, N.Y., where she began a career as a family foliage artist.
Almost every family sports a super sleuth genealogist that can dig into ancestral lineage, according to Diehl, who has carved a niche as an artist painting family trees from their research.
Living in the Beehive State, where members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have focused on genealogy for years, some people might assume Diehl is a Mormon. Think twice.
"I'm Episcopalian, but I do wonder if this would be a good place for me to find clients," Diehl said. "I've always known that genealogy was of special interest to the Mormon community. I just haven't met any, other than a family in Texas, and I actually drew the (Salt Lake Temple) on their tree."
Beyond Utah's boundaries, however, genealogy has become a popular activity.
"It's a real trend in the whole country," Diehl said. "There's so much available information."
Though Diehl doesn't do research for her clients, she did visit the Family Tree Center on Main Street last winter before moving to Park City.
"I was so amazed there was a whole center there just to help people who want to do that research." she said.
About five years ago, Diehl happened upon her newfound career while teaching art at The Stony Brook School on Long Island, New York.
"The headmaster's wife asked me to help her make a gift for her father's 70th birthday," she said. "So, she sneaked into his study and pulled out all of the crumpled papers he had researched from his family and gave them to me."
Diehl transformed the research into an unforgettable family tree, so impressive the painting never made it out of the hands of guests during the celebration.
"It never got to the easel," Diehl said. "It got passed around, and everybody studied the names and enjoyed it."
The names of great-grandparents, siblings, nieces, and nephews written in calligraphy and scrolled on parchment all found a place on the watercolor oak tree. A Greek key design on the bordered the Damianos family tree.
Diehl said the elderly man for whom the tree was painted cried when he recieved it.
"When you're 70 years old, you have everything you need," she said. "It was just special having eight generations on this painting."
The uplifting experience caused Diehl to reflect on her own life pursuit. Having one child already and one on the way, she decided that painting at home would enable her to spend more time with her children.
Using her own family tree to sell more work, she tapped family members who had already spent time discovering their family roots.
"I have an aunt on my mother's side who had researched her family," Diehl said, "My mother-in-law had done her own and her husband's."
As a mother. Diehl values the family institution. "We're so fragmented and fast paced, but family should be a shelter. I want people to walk into my family and experience peace, not chaos," she said. "Painting the tree is just a visual expression that each if us is connected to others, and that matters."
It's not unusual for Diehl to be commissioned be people from all over the country, and even beyond.
"I even had a woman in Spain who wanted a family tree painted for her husband as a Christmas present," she said.
"I have one that was a descendant from William the Conqueror," she said. "The painting reflects a slice in this decendant's lineage from 1087, when William the Conqueror was born, to 1590."
Diehl also has painted a family tree for some descendants of Abraham Lincoln's cousins, the Hanks family. Another client was able to show legal documentation with proof of authenticity that he was a decendant of Stephen Hopkins, born in 1585, who sailed to America on the Mayflower.
"They showed me their papers, and said there were only 14 males who got off the ship," she said.
Diehl likes to paint small and large family trees. She once painted a tree for a Catholic famliy with 10 children and 33 grandchildren. She estimates a painting that large would now cost about $500.
"It was a gift to the matriarch and patriarch of the family," she said.
Painting larger family trees going back several generations would require using the traditional oak tree, according to Diehl, who has been asked to paint more than 25 family trees in the past using watercolors, pen and ink.
"The oak is a strong, stable and majestic tree. Its roots go deep," Diehl explained. "You like those associations."
But it really doesn't matter what lineage a person comes from or how large a family is.
For smaller paintings of only three generations, she will sometimes use a maple tree, which Diehl said would cosr about $400.
Most are gifts for anniversaries, weddings and birthdays. A client provides Diehl with names and dates for her to lay out their tree. She also likes to paint other elements that are important to the family.
"Like their family home, or a crest," Diehl said, as she pointed to a photograph of a piece she painted for someone else. "This guy flew during World War II, so I painted a war plane next to the tree."
"I'm doing a piece right now for a bride," she said. "They are putting themselves in the trunk and then they are going up through each of their lines. That will be displayed at their reception."
One of the most satisfying aspects of her job, however, is the feedback she recieves from families.
"That's what is fun," she said. "I love to hear the response from recipients."