The Ski Journal - Volume 18, Issue 1
LEXI DOWDALL’S WHY IN WATERCOLOR
Words Nicole Cordingley 2024-09-24 08:20:11
I love the way the Park City ski resorts glow under the moonlight. I tried to capture that feeling with this painting of Deer Valley’s Bald Mountain.
A hundred-inch storm sat draped like a blanket over Little Cottonwood Canyon, UT, in January 2021, causing an infamous “interlodge.” After 60 hours confined inside, the town of Alta was let loose to an open ski area and a closed highway. Fondly referred to as “Country Club,” it was an Alta skier’s dream. If you had the good fortune to be stuck in the canyon, near-empty slopes were yours for the taking. Lexi Dowdall was there and skied some of the deepest snow of her life. “It was a flawless day, and I wanted to preserve that blissful feeling,” she recalls. “I scooped up some snow in a Nalgene water bottle with plans to incorporate it into some of my watercolor paintings.”
With skis, boots, poles and empty milk jugs, Lexi’s ski day checklist is a little unique. Three years after that infamous Alta interlodge, she’s amidst a project to paint all 15 of Utah’s ski resorts, using snowmelt from each resort. She calls it Paint by Powder, a multi-year project to both document her love for skiing in Utah, as well as bring awareness to the threats of climate change to skiing these mountains. Scooping up snow midslope, in lift lines and behind base lodges, Lexi has gotten more than a few pull-the-goggles-up looks while on her journey turning snowflakes into art.
When you run into Lexi, her inviting smile is the first thing you see, whether in the lift line on a powder day or a coffee shop in downtown Salt Lake City. She’s quick to clarify that she’s a skier-artist, not an artist-skier. “The act of skiing is what inspires me to paint,” she says, reflecting on the relationship between her two life pursuits. Throughout a winding career path, Lexi has refused to compromise her skiing—friends, boyfriends, interests and jobs all connect back to the Wasatch.
That flawless Country Club Day at Alta doesn’t stand alone—Lexi skis more Utah powder in a season than most do in a lifetime—but it was one of the first times she had bottled up a small piece of the magic. Painting, especially with the very water molecules she’s just spent the day blasting through on skis, has become a way to extend those moments. “With my art, I want to share a place that has affected me,” she says. “I aim to create something that resonates, whether or not you have a personal connection to the place.”
At age two, Lexi started skiing in Little Cottonwood Canyon. “I couldn’t have asked for a better childhood playground,” Lexi reflects. Every day, she and her younger sister accompanied their dad to work as an Emergency Room Physician at the Snowbird Medical Clinic. The mountain acted as their babysitter, and they’d ski rain or shine, often with the whole place to themselves on quiet midweek mornings. Outside the canyon, fitting in at school felt challenging for kids who weren’t part of Utah’s predominant religion. While the popular kids spent Sundays at church, Little Cottonwood Canyon became a haven for Lexi, her own place of worship.
Roaming the ski area alone, or with her little sister Andrea in tow, helped her form a sense of independence paramount to Lexi’s lifestyle now. Looking back, she attributes those formative years to helping her develop the confidence to build her own career and follow a less traditional path.
When Lexi turned 16 and got the keys to a faded 1986 Nissan pickup, her mom, Marci loaded the backseat with a sleeping bag, shovel and emergency food. Highway 210 in Little Cottonwood Canyon, now infamous for powder day traffic, was then so infrequently traveled that her mom worried that if she slid off the road, she would need to fend for herself. Instead of discouraging Lexi from going out on her own, she gave her the tools she thought she’d need, trusting that her teenage daughter could hold her own.
Lexi’s work life, while on the surface charmed and carefree, has been woven by a thread of silver linings, adapting and rolling with the punches of unexpected circumstances. In 2016, she endured surprise lay-offs from two different outdoor industry jobs within six weeks. That whiplash spun her to freelance work in marketing—projects for Ski Utah, Sweetgrass Production and the International Freeskiers & Snowboarders Association (IFSA). She even worked as a social media manager for legendary ski map painter Jim Niehues. No day looked the same, and she loved the dynamic nature of freelancing. But what she loved most was that her flexible schedule allowed her to prioritize skiing.
Then, the pandemic shook Lexi’s world again. By March 2020, most of her gigs had evaporated. With nothing else to do, she took on a 10-day drawing challenge that she stumbled across on YouTube. She was immediately hooked. Soon, it spiraled into a 100-day painting challenge, during which she watched instructional videos to learn basic watercolor techniques.
It turned out to be a serendipitous refocus. In the years before the pandemic, her workload had grown unsustainable. Flexible work had been enticing, but she had been sprinting in too many directions: running IFSA’s booming freeride division through high-growth years while skiing almost every day in the Cottonwoods, for instance. As she immersed herself in the 100-day painting challenge, Lexi’s creative energy began to flow. She realized how stressed and consumed she had been by her hectic schedule for the previous five years. Painting was a creative outlet she never knew she needed.
Though she picked up watercolor painting in a matter of weeks, Lexi humbly deflects her own acumen: “My philosophy for art is that we are all artists,” she says. “But at some point, most people decide they aren’t artistic or creative. We are all creators, we just need to give ourselves the grace to practice that.”
As Lexi began her journey into art via YouTube tutorials, she was surprised by how quickly she progressed. Lexi doodled in high school, earning her the nickname Doodle (for her last name Dowdall as well as the artistic act), but didn’t pursue any formal creative outlet until 2020.
A few months after taking up watercolor painting, Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s passing in September 2020 deeply shook Lexi. Like many other Americans, she mourned the feminist icon while simultaneously fearing for the future of women’s rights and bodily autonomy. She channeled her emotion into a painting of RBG on skis, titled “The Notorious RBSKI.” She got tons of positive feedback on Instagram, and for the first time, Lexi contemplated selling her paintings. She learned how to create prints of her work and set her shop up as a fundraiser, donating all the initial proceeds of “The Notorious RBSKI” to Planned Parenthood.
Since then, Lexi’s painting career has blossomed. From her cluttered dining table, soaking up the best light in her house, Lexi paints when the snow forecast allows it—no matter how much she loves to paint, she’s still not going to skip a powder day for the sake of art. Her medium of choice is watercolor on cold press watercolor paper. Lexi applies paint in layers, adding depth to the piece with each one, then finishes with permanent ink line work. She spends the most time painting from July to November in preparation for the holiday art market season, storing extra snowmelt in jugs in her studio. After Christmas, her schedule is dictated by the snow forecast. On any given week, she might be painting a ski area, a vintage snowcat, or beer labels for one of her favorite breweries, Templin Family (TF) Brewing.
A self-proclaimed perfectionist, Lexi says that becoming an artist has been a humbling experience. Letting go has been challenging, but also empowering. “You cannot control the outcome of watercolor, you just have to watch it unfold,” she says. “It’s very contrary to my nature and how I want to run my life, so it teaches me a lot about life in general. At the end of the day, if I have to recycle a piece of paper because it didn’t work out, it’s fine. The stakes are low. It’s better to learn something than to sit there and freak out about not painting something perfect.”
Close friend and accomplished action sports photographer, Re Wikstrom, has watched Lexi become an artist. “When I asked why she chose watercolor over other paint mediums,” Re says, “her casual answer was: because it seemed like the most difficult one to learn. She chose the hard way and began to master it. I love that, and it speaks to her character.”
Britt Templin, the owner of TF Brewing, says that every time she sees Lexi she’s beaming. “You can tell she loves what she does,” says Templin. “To me, this shows through in her paintings.”
Through her art business, Kapowder, Lexi donates 5 percent of her sales to Protect Our Winters, in hopes that her work will help bring awareness to the effects of climate change in the Wasatch mountains and beyond. Paint by Powder is a love letter to the mountains of Utah, which, in her opinion, will always hold the best skiing on the planet.
While watercolor painting has become her main focus, Lexi’s creativity still goes well beyond the canvas. In any given week, she may help create a film, paint a ski resort, model for ski photos, manage social media or write a story for Ski Utah. She’s continuously honing her ability to capture and convey the unique aspects of moments that matter. Of course, none of it would be possible without the spark of soul-filling days skiing in the mountain range she loves dearly.
When collecting snow to paint, Lexi carries a large backpack filled with a few jugs to ensure she has enough water for each work. She’s gotten plenty of weird looks from ski patrol while collecting snow—some want to ensure she’s not injured while others have concerns about her eventually drinking the snow.
And it’s not just pristine powder she’s after. One time, commissioned to create a painting of the historic Alta Peruvian Lodge, Lexi decided to bottle hot tub water to paint, topping it off with a shot of tequila from the infamous bar. Although the pack of old men in the hot tub had a lot of questions, they promised to buy a print when Lexi finished her painting.
As a skier-artist, Lexi aims to capture and share her deep connection to the mountains. Her work encapsulates a sense of wonder and that oddly present nostalgia of a perfect moment as it begins to pass by. It’s the feeling of yearning for somewhere you have been, somewhere you still love, for a moment in time you would like to live again. She also aims to paint the why. It’s a question skiers are all too familiar with. Why fight the traffic to Alta? Why wake before the sun for a dawn patrol tour? Why move across the country, work late restaurant shifts, sleep on dirty couches? To see Lexi’s work—a celebration of all the little moments—is to see a glimmer of her why in watercolor.
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