Start from the outside, then work your way in. That's the artistic lesson Kathryn Stats learned the first time she attempted to paint Zion National Park more than 30 years ago. "Painting from within the park is just mind-boggling," Stats said. "Everything's so big, and you're so little."

She moved her easel to just outside Rockville, Utah, where she could look into Zion from a distance. Even then she found the light moving so quickly -- sparking fiery reds, stark yellows and vivid oranges as it traveled across formations -- that her subject changed almost completely with every half-hour.

And it's not just red rocks, but "everything from gold to white to violet," the painter says. "It's the whole spectrum, but leans toward the warm rather than the cool. You don't get that variety of green even in the most interesting forest. [Zion] makes Yosemite look like a tiny, little gray place."

Fighting words to artists and tourists who prefer Yosemite, to be sure, but Stats' sentiment stretches across more than 100 years and scores of other artists who have voted with their paintbrushes.

The legacy of fine painters obsessed by Zion National Park's grandeur is large enough, in fact, to warrant the lion's share of Painters of Utah's Canyons and Deserts , a book jointly written by local art historians Donna L. Poulton and Vern G. Swanson, published last month by Gibbs Smith.

The book begins at 1848 when American landscape painting was still coming into its own, ending with modernist and abstract interpretations of the state's southern landscapes. It was a compilation more than three years in the making, and required selecting 340 images from more than 2,000 that the art historians had sought out.

"I basically fell all over myself saying yes," Poulton said of the call she got from Gibbs Smith to put the book together with Swanson. "The art history of southern Utah had never been written. There have been bits and pieces, but never a whole history."

What emerged from their research, Poulton said, was an artists' subject so captivating as to be almost irresistible, but intimidating enough to make even the best painters admit their limitations. The austere desert beauty of Zion National Park, so alien to those accustomed to landscapes of verdant green, is, in short, the sort of challenge painters love to embrace.

"You have to be a great artist to take on Zion, because there are so many vertical planes," Poulton said. "You're always looking up at these huge monuments and compressed landscapes. You cannot be intimidated."

Many landscape painters from the East Coast found that, even if they were accomplished enough to paint Zion, they put it off. The landscape struck them as inhospitable, contrary to their expectations of nature as a life-sustaining force.

The region's artistic history begins with Alfred Lambourne, an English-born early Utah immigrant who became one of the first to capture the landscape on canvas. He was thunderstruck by his first encounter. "It is a nature epic; it places us among the primitive," he wrote in the late 19th century. "One feels there a grandeur akin to the thoughts of Aeschylus and the words of holy writ. To describe it truly one would need the simplicity and strength of the antique, the reverence of the prophets and 'the large utterance of the early gods.' "

From Lambourne on, Zion has enjoyed a long run of fine artists who captured its gemlike radiance and foreboding angles, including Thomas Moran, Conrad Buff and Maynard Dixon. Only the flu epidemic of the early 1900s and the Depression could stop the flow of artists. The pace picked up soon enough, with the park's "Great White Throne" emerging as a favorite subject.

By 1980, Poulton said, artistic renderings of Zion became so common that painting its scenes became an exercise in cliché and overkill. The park had become a tourist trap. Artists in search of a similar landscape, but different sights, turned their attention to southern Utah's more isolated regions or toyed with the notion of Zion Park itself.

One of Painters of Utah's Canyons and Deserts' most mischievous inclusions is a print of Salt Lake City painter Trent Call's "April in Zion," which depicts a calendar girl smearing whitewash over one of the park's small reservoirs, as if the nature scene were graffiti nonlandscape artists had grown tired of.

"The landscape is so well known in Utah," Call said. "It dominates the art market here. But in the rest of the art world, graffiti is huge. ['April in Zion'] was a kind of tongue-in-cheek thing."

Stats, 64, said she repeats her painter's pilgrimage to Zion, in part, because she finds its spectrum of reds more interesting than other colors. She becomes so deeply absorbed while working on a painting that she forgets her surroundings. Once, she says, she came within a foot of a rattlesnake.

Stats has an art studio in Sandy, but when she's in southern Utah, she often stays at the Rockville house of fellow artist Kate Starling. Starling is an Arizona native who moved to Utah in 1985; Zion National Park was her first subject as a budding painter, and she says it may well be her last.

"Most people are really good painters before they come here," said Starling, whose work, along with paintings of Stats, is featured in Poulton and Swenson's book. "For me, it's where I became a painter."

Starling doesn't approach Zion as a spiritual epiphany to be decoded, but as a gallery of light there for the enjoyment of its challenge. "The light hits it a certain way," she says. "That pretty much separates why you paint one thing, and not another."