About
Robert Wright
About the Author
Robert Wright entered the Air Force on a delayed enlistment in December 1968. In March 1969, he attended basic training and air traffic control (ATC) school and completed it in early August. His first ATC assignment was the tower at Pease AFB in New Hampshire. In May 1970, he and Carol Hansteen were married, and she joined him at Pease AFB.
In January 1971, he went to a Vietnam support unit, the First Mobile Communications Group, based at Clark Field in the Philippines. A month later, he was deployed to Vietnam and worked in a radar unit at Khe Sanh, a support airfield for Operation Lam Son 719. After several months, they returned to Clark Field, and he worked in Clark Approach (radar) until March 1972, when the assignment to Clark Approach ended in March, his new assignment to Fifth Mobile Communications at Robins AFB, Georgia. In Georgia, he had two different tower assignments. In 1973, he used his base of preference, changing stations to Hamilton AFB California in the Bay Area, north of San Francisco, working radar and tower operations until leaving the Air Force in 1975.
He started with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in June 1976 and became a fully rated center radar controller eighteen months later. While working at the FAA, he attended classes full-time at the University of Utah, graduating in 1980. He went on strike and was fired in 1981. He then studied for his stockbroker certifications and licensing. He worked in the business until the 1987 crash, building a book of nearly 700 clients.
In January 1988, he joined the Utah Air National Guard. He worked at Clover Control until his retirement militarily in 2006 and Civil Service in 2008. He worked as a part-time controller until full-time in 1996. In 1998, he became a watch supervisor and remained there until his retirement in 2008. Also, at Clover, he was deployed twice to the Balkans, then Kuwait (tower chief controller), Iraqi Freedom's Balad AB, in Iraq, as a tower and radar chief controller, and finally, Enduring Freedom as head of all regional ATC contracts. He was in charge of the ATC in five locations: Bagram, Kandahar, and Kabul in Afghanistan; K2 in Uzbekistan; and Manas in Kyrgyzstan.
In 2012, he began work with the Utah Transit Authority (UTA), operating a commuter train between Provo and Ogden. He left UTA in the fall of 2017. Robert graduated from the University of Utah with a bachelor's in sociology and psychology. He and his wife, Carol, have two sons and two grandchildren.
About the Artist Robert Wright
For the most part, I am a self-taught, trial-and-error artist. I have been drawing since I was a child and continually took every art course available in grade school, and later in college, all electives were art courses. I have completed fifteen Great Courses; each is an upper-level college course of study with approximately 20 to 40 lessons in each course. Great Courses covers every era and facet of the art world, including architecture, sculpture, and painting. In conjunction with the Great Courses, I have been very fortunate through the military and civilian government work to have visited most of the major museums, churches, and smaller public collections that house the world's most spectacular art.
Until recently, I was a member of the Holladay Arts Council as the Visual Arts Chair and director of five significant Utah art shows at Holladay City Hall. Those four years on the Holladay council were the most rewarding and enjoyable experience ever. For years, I had art classes on two Saturdays a month at no charge to the participants. I have worked on illustrating college yearbooks; school plays, scenery, and backdrops. I developed the backdrop for a Christmas play program at Church a few years ago. The backdrop was 64 feet wide and 20 feet high, with a winter scene of a local city and a background of the mountains surrounding the city. I've worked on logos, greeting cards, family crests, jewelry designs, and designs on glassware, trophies, and CD covers.
I've always enjoyed the creative process. For me, the process begins with an emotion or feeling about a visual experience, an idea, a word, a phrase, or possibly an event from the Bible and becomes a creation of the mind. Nothing opens up that creative mind like developing a mural and seeing it through to completion. In the last three years, I completed three murals. In 2010, I spent three months on a large map of the world 28 feet wide and 19 feet tall and painted it to have an old-world parchment look. Then, for 12 months, in 2011 and 2012, I completed two room murals to include the ceilings in each room. The first room is a large nursery with a circus theme, including a large circus train, hot air balloons, cartoon animals, and a large tree trunk painted on the wall with actual tree limbs from the wall to the ceiling. A toddler room was the second room mural with a sea-to-shining sea theme. That theme started with the ocean and a lighthouse, then moved around the room from meadowlands (with a tree like the one in the nursery) to the desert, Rocky Mountains, farmlands, and back to the ocean. Around the walls are trains, planes, a large eagle, dune buggies, hang gliders, hot air balloons, and gophers playing musical instruments. Today, I continue to paint things I am intrigued with, such as lighthouses, WWII airplanes, large ships from almost any era, flowers, mainly roses, Biblical scenes, and animals. Occasionally, I do commission work; the latest piece is a 36X48 painting of a lamb lying down with a lion entitled "Peace."
My military career influenced my art. The experiences from my military adventures were a strong driving force behind the emotions that are apparent in my work over the last twenty years.
Once again, I enjoyed the creative process, but none of my work came out as I had imagined. The creative process is about changing from the imagined to the reality of what we can produce. Thus far, I have not been disappointed with what reality looks like.
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