All callings either professional or artistic have their stereotypes. The accountant is "boring." The salesperson can't help but slap your back. As for artists, they're either obsessed, possessed or stuck in the tunnel vision of some technique or medium only they can understand.

Christopher McKellar, musician and visual artist, smashes that stereotype, and then some. His thoughts, skills and artistic vision are all so wide and quick-turning you might have to fasten your seat belt.

The 60-year-old bakes artisan bread, weaves wool into yarn and waxes eloquent about the ecology of grazing. Two giant sacks of flour sit in the corner of his kitchen. A basket of wool sits near a spinning wheel in the living room. If it weren't for a blanket of snow outside, he'd almost certainly show off his garden.

"I don't know how people live with just two ovens, to be honest," he says, walking across his kitchen to another oven. "I love connections, from their beginning to their end: from seeds to harvest, from canning peaches to cooking a peach cobbler, from grinding flour to bread."

The connection between his 33-year career as principal violist for the Utah Symphony (where he recently swapped his leadership role for a regular chair in the section) and his current occupation with wilderness scenes rendered in watercolor may seem too wide an expanse to follow. For aficionados of either art or music, it also leads to suspicions that he let one of his two passions suffer at the expense of the other over the years.

If so, the thought has never occurred to McKellar, who, if he has a regretful bone in his body, hides it well. Drawing wilderness scenes in pen from the orchestra tour bus, as he did in Germany three years ago, he's managed to savor and sustain his creative duality in music and art. If anything, he finds the connections between them too obvious to miss. Walking through the Baroque cathedrals of Europe deepened his understanding of Bach's music. He compares the role of his chosen instrument, a link between the brighter sound of the violin sections and the mellow tone of the cellos, to the color between orange and indigo that fills out a sunset.

The resonance of McKellar's manifold artistic experiences is revealed in his watercolors of wilderness scenes, which are explosions of color. Come Valentine's Day, he will have his first exhibit in years at the Sonata Gallery, 4500 S. 1106 East, an exhibit space founded by local attorney Billy Crocker, specializing in works by musicians who cross over into visual arts.

It's a tradition far more common than you'd think. Wassily Kandinksy, a founding artist of 20th-century abstract painting, grew up in Moscow playing piano and cello. Post-impressionist artist Paul Klee played violin in a Swiss music society and married his pianist wife before taking the art world by storm. "You get experiences in classical music that you don't get anywhere else," McKellar said.

But art, McKellar said, is not as bound by the beginning-middle-end order of time. It exists "all at once." And when a mark is made, McKellar likes the fact that it stares back at him from the canvas, while the stroke of his viola bow creates sound that slips into the past.

To McKellar, the enduring appeal of both is that they create their own sonority. The musician/artist likens the connection between the two to synesthesia, in which sounds translate in the mind as sights in a back-and-forth exchange. Color, too, is bound by time, through moments of intensity and hue dictated by the sun's orbit.

In his artwork, McKellar is inspired to re-create the stunning vistas he comes across during hikes through national parks of Zion, Yellowstone or the Arizona desert. The scene makes him stop, but it's color that determines how long he'll linger.

McKellar's expertise with color is best captured in the watercolors "First Breath," "Going My Way" and "Landed," all painted this year after backpack excursions. Shapes play their part in his work -- "Landed," a portrait of Angels Landing in Zion National Park, captures the incidental figure of a well-known Fremont Indian pictograph -- but color remains central.

Unlike most artists working in watercolor, who first paint darker colors over their canvas followed by lighter colors, McKellar reverses that order, glazing darker colors over a lighter foundation. The result is a richer texture more like oil brushwork.

McKellar is so captivated by color that he's written a two-page, staple-bound essay on the topic, inspired by his first sight of Utah's redrock country. "More than red exists, of course. The local colors can arise in bands of orange, burnt orange, burnt red, yellow, white, blue-grey," reads a key passage. "The more you look, as the more you experience your loving companion, the more beauty and variation you see, the closer to infinite you perceive the offerings."

A conversation with McKellar is heady stuff. No more so than watercolors in which McKellar flirts with otherworldly post-impressionism reminiscent of Van Gogh. "Breath of Trees," inspired by a juniper tree he spied between Fredonia and Jacob Lake in Arizona, renders the branches aflame in what McKellar calls "the breath between plant and animal kingdom that's also an act of love." The life-giving exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen between plants and animals becomes so passionate that the tree stands on the verge of consuming self-sacrifice.

He's fascinated by the notion of "wholism," or the symbiotic relationships in nature that give life and take it away -- up to a point.

"It's not so much what drives [my art], but what gives me eyes to see what I wouldn't otherwise," McKellar said. "When you see these interactions, it's a whole different place, which is kind of fun."

Part of the proceeds from the sale of his work at the upcoming exhibition will be given to the Mundi Project, which helps fund music education in piano for underprivileged children. Once again, McKellar's twin passions come full circle. Stepping down from his chair as principal violist was never about neglecting music for art. "It's more about freeing up some attention," he said.