Two children climb into a painted tree near Provo’s Center Street. Real branches overlap the image, softening the boundary between the sidewalk and Colby Sanford’s imagined world. It is a large mural about a small experience: being young, looking outward, finding somewhere to explore.
That attention to ordinary life runs through Sanford’s career. The Provo-raised painter has exhibited in Park City, earned recognition from Utah’s public art collection, and had work included in a U.S. Art in Embassies exhibition in Geneva. The subjects remain close to home: children, parents, shared rooms, trees and the passing of time.
A Provo childhood, an unexpected detour
Sanford grew up with unusual permission to make things. His parents let him paint his bedroom walls. As a teenager, he moved into a yurt in the backyard and turned his old bedroom into a studio, he told Artists of Utah’s 15 Bytes in 2018.
His route back to painting led through Asia. After an LDS mission in Taiwan, he took a ceramics-factory job in China, where his knowledge of ceramics and Chinese proved useful. Painting after work became a serious practice. By the time he returned to Utah, he was already selling work online.
He went on to earn a BFA at Brigham Young University in 2018. His hometown became the place to build an art career, with work grounded in family life rather than a need to leave it behind.
Success built around paying attention
His first solo exhibition at Park City’s Meyer Gallery, Remembering Home, opened in 2018. Its source was his grandparents’ property in Maine: childhood memories revisited with his own family, and the distance between remembering a place and seeing it again.
The milestones continued. The State Department lists his 2017 acrylic painting Water Walk in its temporary Geneva USUN 2020 exhibition. His CV records a 2022 purchase award for Patchwork Sky for the State of Utah’s Alice Merrill Horne Art Collection, alongside multiple honors from the Springville Museum of Art. These are concrete signs of a career reaching beyond the home studio.
Yet the studio still matters. On his website, Sanford describes painting at home in Provo, sometimes in the living room. He works with a restrained acrylic palette on wooden panels and often pairs images with short poems. A person reading or a child resting becomes worth sustained attention. The paintings ask us to notice relationships through gesture, distance and light.
Find the mural near Center Street
UTA’s Provo–Orem Art Crawl identifies the mural as How This Branch Twists and Turns. Its guide lists 20 N. Freedom Boulevard, on the western wall of the building identified as Joey’s, just north of Center Street. Artists of Utah documented the same tree-house mural at 198 W. Center Street in 2021.
For a fuller view, UTA recommends the Utah Valley Convention Center courtyard across Freedom Boulevard. Step back there and the painted canopy and living trees begin to share the scene. The exterior work can be viewed without gallery admission; daylight makes its details easier to read.
It is an approachable introduction to Sanford’s art. Before the exhibitions, awards or a painting’s journey overseas, there is something almost anyone can recognize: a moment with another person, made important because someone stopped to look.