Pilar Pobil, an acclaimed Utah painter who captured life in vibrant color and inspired generations of artists as a mentor and friend, has died.

Pobil died Wednesday at the age of 98, according to Kathryn Lindquist, vice president of the Pilar Pobil Heritage Foundationthe Salt Lake City nonprofit arts organization that bears his name.

“When I started making my works, the world opened up to me,” Pobil told the Salt Lake Tribune in 1994. “I realized I had ideas. Painting makes me a bigger person, less interior. …Being an artist has made me more fulfilled, determined and liberated.

Pobil drew inspiration for her paintings from the life around her in Salt Lake City, including people she knew or shoppers she saw at the store. Downtown Farmers Market at Pioneer Park. The women she captured in her paintings and sculptures show, in her words, “strength, energy and self-control.”

“I feel like I personally know each of the people who appear in my works,” Pobil told Tribune art critic George Dibble in 1986. “The children who stumble slightly on the path, the person who reads quietly a book with calm relaxation, the eager groups at a carnival, the neighbors talking on the other side of the fence, I know them all.

Most of her expressionist style, however, is inspired by Spain, where she was born, and Mexico, where she had a second home by the sea for 30 years.

“A lot of it comes from Spain and a lot of it comes from Mexico,” Pobil told The Tribune in a 2000 interview. “I love the Mexican way. (People) are wonderful in the sense that they have no inhibitions. They are not afraid.

A self-taught artist, Pobil paints in watercolor, oil and acrylic, sometimes passing the paint on the canvas and on the frames. Sometimes she painted on shoes, boots, furniture, doors and parts of houses. She sculpted clay on wood and sewed and embroidered fabric. She wrote a memoir, “My kitchen table: sketch of my life”, in 2007 in which she collected her stories and 50 of her paintings.

Over the years, Pobil opened his home in Salt Lake City’s Avenues neighborhood to schoolchildren, letting them paint in his backyard. She also mentored aspiring professional artists.

In 1995, Pobil started an annual art exhibition, “Art in Pilar’s Garden”, to allow non-artists to meet artists in a more accessible setting than an art gallery, with food and music included. Some 300 people now attend the event over a weekend in June.

“I hope that (people) will come to admire the art in an atmosphere of spring beauty, conviviality and friendship, generosity of spirit and love for what makes life worth living experienced,” Pobil said in 2021.

The Pilar Pobil Legacy Foundation was launched to continue the garden event and “celebrate my Spanish heritage by encouraging artists of Latino and Hispanic descent, among others,” she wrote on the foundation’s website.

Among the foundation’s programs are the Pilar Pobil Humanities Scholarshipan annual endowed scholarship awarded to a transfer student from Salt Lake Community College to the Department of Writing and Rhetorical Studies in the College of Humanities at the University of Utah. The beneficiaries are often, like Pobil, immigrant women – first-generation students who work to support their families and do not qualify for typical scholarships.

In a post on Facebook Wednesdayformer Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskupski wrote: “It is so heartbreaking to lose this bright light in my life. I will forever miss his smile, his laugh, his stories and his enthusiasm for his latest creation.

Pilar Pobil was born on October 26, 1926 in Madrid and grew up in Mallorca, Spain. According to family lore, she was 9 years old when her father, a Spanish naval admiral, was assassinated at the start of the Spanish Civil War and the family fled to Portugal.

The family later returned to Majorca, where Pobil attended a convent school. She sculpted with clay in her garden, painted furniture and drew.

“I always had a pencil and paper in my hands,” Pobil told La Tribune in 2000. “But at that time, in Spain, women were not supposed to have a career. Our future was at home or in the convent.

In 1956, she married Walter Smith and the couple moved to Salt Lake City, where he was born and raised. They had three children and were married for 43 years, until Smith died in 1999.

Smith inspired Pobil to return to art, she said in 2000, by suggesting she take a pottery class at the Art Barn in Salt Lake City. She then bought her own clay and began sculpting at the kitchen table. Painting soon followed, first in watercolor then in oil.

Walter’s brother, Paul Smith, was a prominent landscape watercolorist and Pobil spent time working with him. “I started painting a little bit in his style, and then I started painting on my own,” she said. “I didn’t want to be influenced by anyone else. I wanted to grow on my own terms.

In February 2000, a few months after Smith’s death, Pobil dedicated a gallery exhibition to him at the Kimball Art Center in Park City.

“He encouraged me so much. He was also an excellent critic. He never let me do anything,” Pobil said at the time. “Finally he said, ‘You know, I can’t find anything to criticize anymore.'”

A recurring theme in Pobil’s still lifes was apples, influenced by her husband. “He once told me that no one paints apples like (Paul) Cézanne,” she said, referring to the 19th-century French painter. “I didn’t say anything. But I started painting apples and he liked them.

Other foods, like artichokes and pomegranates, were also favorite subjects. “I tell people I paint and then I eat my subjects,” she joked.

Pobil’s works are in the collections of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, the Springfield Museum of Art, and the Utah Arts Council. Other works are on display at the Governor’s Mansion, the presbytery of the Madeleine Cathedral, the Utah Cultural Celebration Center and the American Embassy in Mauritius.

Among the many honors awarded to Pobil, according to its foundation, is the title of knighthood – the Royal Order of Isabel the Catholic – awarded by King Felipe VI of Spain in 2016.

Pobil was also named one of “15 most influential artists” by the publication 15 Bytes in 2019, received the Salt Lake City Mayor’s Artist Award in 2020 and is among the prominent Utah women featured on Zions Bank Utah Women 2020 mural in downtown Salt Lake City. In February, the Utah Cultural Celebration Center in West Valley City has renamed its art gallery Pilar Pobil Celebration Gallery.

Pobil is survived by two of his children, Monica Pasqual and Maggie de Cerda. His son, Luis Fernando Smith, died in 2020 from COVID-19.

Memorial services are underway.