AT AGE TWO , Lexi started skiing in Little Cottonwood Canyon. “I couldn’t have asked for a better childhood play-ground,” Lexi reflects. Every day, she and her younger sister accompanied their dad to work as an Emergency Room Phy-sician 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 An-drea in tow, helped her form a sense of independence para-mount 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 wor-ried 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 care-free, 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 water-color techniques. It turned out to be a serendipitous refocus. In the years before the pandemic, her workload had grown unsustain-able. 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 philoso-phy 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 tutori-als, 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. Lexi Dowdall Gallerie 093
The Ski Journal Volume 18, Issue 1: Page 93
