Taking in a Doug Snow painting involves weaving back and forth, side to side — all to absorb the singular beauty of landscape, sky and clouds.

Here in Salt Lake City, Snow is the subject of a retrospective honoring the life and work of the artist, teacher, playwright, opera lover, husband and father who died in 2009 at 82.

The exhibit, presented at the Salt Lake Art Center and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, contains 34 of Snow's works and runs through Jan. 8, 2012.

Many of the oils are of the Cockscomb, a soaring ridge near Teasdale, in southern Utah, where Snow built a studio, then a home many years ago.

Last month, I had the unexpected chance to see the ridge through the high, wide windows of Snow's home, where his wife, Susan Snow, welcomed us with glasses of pure water from her well.

Walking outside, I studied the Cockscomb in the equally pure air of a Wayne County day. But when I saw his paintings this week, it became clear that Snow's vision was far more complex than mine, as evidenced in the rich colors he saw in its crest of Navajo sandstone.

"Grab and investigate," was his mantra, his old friend Frank McEntire says.

You see that in his early work as well as the later; in "Untitled," a spire of red-orange bordered by dark borders top and bottom, painted sometime in the 1950s. And in his "Thorn Bush," a dark, brooding, even slightly frightening piece created in 1960.

Snow's later work, though, reflected his desire to "mine his home country for everything he could in terms of its history and geography as inspiration for his art," says McEntire, a fellow artist who served as guest curator for the retrospective.

"His aspiration was being able to capture the poetic nature of the Cockscomb and the Colorado Plateau," McEntire says. "Of course he did other work as well, but that was his recurring passion."

Gazing for a long time at Snow's 1985 "Cockscomb," I felt a quiet urge to weep. McEntire told me that was the artist's intent.

Snow wanted to elicit intellectual enjoyment, but also tried to "evoke the emotional quality in his work," he says. "He certainly was able to play on those heartstrings."

As one who has spent some of the best times of my life in Utah's canyon country, I was transfixed by "Canyon Reflection" and its date, 1983-1999. The canyon curves from right to left, darkness merging into deep red-orange, then lighter shades, with the vertical aspects melding with the horizontal.

All of Snow's work reflects a spiritual quality, a relationship, with the land and sky. His last painting was a work in progress, with a bottom element that seemed to be a groundscape, the top a sky with floating orbs. He'd worked on it the morning he died, McEntire said.

He and Susan Snow titled it "Final Light," which also is the name of the retrospective. Along with all the other works, seeing it is an imperative for anyone who treasures Utah art.

Peg McEntee is a news columnist. Reach her at pegmcentee@sltrib.com and facebook/pegmcentee.