FARMINGTON – Big, bold, vibrant are words that only start to describe the paintings of Gayle Barigar.

Barigar, who moved to Farmington last fall from Idaho, has an eye for magnifying her subject. If you like a pear, for instance, look at the detail, she said, then what happens when you magnify it.

Many of her paintings with bold, vibrant colors adorn the walls of her large older home on Main Street, the former home of Olive Hodgkins.

After studying photos of space taken by the Hubble telescope, she said, her eye picked up details that in her painting reveal the silhouette of a woman, animals and the faces of two men. One portrait has eyes that follow the viewer as they move across the room. Fruits, flowers, fish, all large and detailed, are just some of her subjects done in oil.

Pursuing her artistic talent has been a life-long adventure for Barigar. She was exposed to the world of art as a young child through her grandmother who was an accomplished sculptor, she said. Raised in California, her mother’s friend was a producer at the Pasadena Playhouse and would hang Barigar’s drawings at the Playhouse to encourage her work.

While living in the Sierras, her husband liked to read aloud, she said, sometimes up to an hour and half. While she listened, she took flowers and created a flowered font that depicted the first letter of the flower. The C was drawn with columbine, F with foxglove, T with thistle. When she came to X and Z, she went to the Latin alphabet for a flower. The K was for kit-kit-kadee, what people in the West call mountain misery, she said, because of the scent attached to it and them after they walked through the knee-high plant.

When the alphabet was complete, she sold the font to Letraset in 1981. A sheet of the alphabet was sold for $14, and they contracted to give her 7 cents for each letter sold. The contract lasted 25 years but was not renewed because the company had sold out and with computers, she said, it isn’t quite the same.

She related how a few years after selling the font, she opened a 12-page Christmas brochure from Levi Strauss that had used her alphabet through it. At times, she said, royalties from the alphabet have been quite good.

During the 1970s, she worked as a storyboard artist for the U.S. Army, Bell Lab and Western Electric producing characters to help with in-house training. The characters would interact to teach complicated engineering techniques. For the army, her storyboards taught battlefield responsibilities and duties. Permission to use Beetle Bailey was sought and granted, she said, and she used the character to teach new techniques for the soldiers.

After a move to Twin Rivers, Idaho, she taught calligraphy, drawing and graphic arts part-time at a local college and met Wiletta Warberg who was the second in command for Gourmet Magazine under Julia Child. When Warberg developed her own business to promote local foods from Idaho, Barigar did the graphics for her opening, she said.

Barigar then taught art for K-12 students retiring last May and moved here after a son who has a summer home on Clearwater in Industry found her this house. Her son, Kelly Kading, married a local woman, Nancy Barrows Kading, and they summer here and winter in Texas, she said. She has two other sons, Kevin and Kent, and all three were born in April.

Barigar continues her work with commission pieces for people who send her photos of their home and the walls that will hold the large paintings.