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DRAPER — A few weeks ago, Stephanie Deer went grocery shopping. Other shoppers did double-takes.
She wore a mid-1950's flower print Dolly Meyers full circle skirt with a big pink flower at the waist, pearls, white gloves, vintage heels, and a beehive hairdo. Deer looked like she just stepped off the set of a Doris Day movie.
"It gets a little strange sometimes when people ask if I'm in a play," Deer said.
But this is no play. This is Stephanie Deer.
I spent 20 days painting and I changed my life.
–Stephanie Deer
"This is who I am," Deer said.
The Salt Lake woman regularly dresses in vintage clothing and wears a beehive hairdo and she makes her living painting a woman who dresses in vintage clothing and wears a beehive hairdo.
Just a few years ago, Deer was not an artist, but an interior designer. She had commissioned an artist to produce two seven by nine foot paintings for a chapel. Deer says the day the artist was scheduled to begin, the woman quit.
The church was supposed to open in three weeks and Deer couldn't find another artist at the last minute.
"It was a crisis, to put it mildly," Deer said. "I spoke with my husband. He's like, ‘why don't you fake it?'"
So she went to the public library, checked out books about painting technique, read for two days and then went to the chapel.
"I spent 20 days painting and I changed my life," Deer said.
The client loved the work and the completely self-taught artist began offering the service to other design clients. And she, because of her fashion sense and the state she lives in, began painting a character some call the beehive lady.
The beehive lady, like Deer, wears a beehive hairdo and vintages clothing and, like Deer, loves everything Utah. She skis, loves fries with fry sauce, makes funeral potatoes, visits Hole in the Rock and bakes cakes in Happy Valley.
She can arrange flowers, chop wood, ride a snowmobile. She's got beautiful nails, a great outfit. She's just cool, OK? She's been bitten by a scorpion and she is still here.
–Stephanie Deer
Deer named and modeled the beehive lady after her mother, Loretta, "one of the most the grandest women I know."
"She can arrange flowers, chop wood, ride a snowmobile," Deer said. "She's got beautiful nails, a great outfit. She's just cool, OK? She's been bitten by a scorpion and she is still here."
Deer and her beehive lady paintings were invited to the annual Zions Bank art show. Deer says she arrived, saw all the traditional Utah landscape art and panicked.
"I actually think I had a panic attack," Deer said. "I am a Technicolor person with a weird hairdo and weird clothes. I didn't fit in. I thought the jig was up."
She ended up in the bathroom in tears, until a senior vice president of the bank talked her out.
Deer sold all of her paintings. She says the first sale was to the president of the bank, who gave it to Jon Huntsman, Jr. The painting, the beehive lady framed by the state of Utah, ended up hanging at the ambassador's residence in Beijing.
"I couldn't believe that something like that could happen to a lady from Draper who drives a minivan," Deer said. "I mean, I make lunches, right? I drive the carpool."
She sticks out way out.
–Tom Alder
Two days later, Tom Alder from Williams Fine Art phoned and asked to represent her. Alder, whose gallery specializes in early Utah and Mormon art, says her work sticks out.
"She sticks out way out," Alder said with a laugh.
Within a year, she left interior design to paint full-time.
Deer moved her studio into a space next door to Mini's Cupcakes, owned by Leslie Fiet, who also dresses vintage. They met at the Zions Bank art show and became best friends.
"We looked at each other," Fiet said. "You're like my missing link."
"It was like twins separated at birth," Deer said.
Deer turned the space into her grandmother's living room. There are vintage lamps, an old dark green couch with bullion and fringe, a canasta deck, a vintage View-Master and a stack of Archie comics.
"Mayberry-retro-vintage, meets a little bit of Marilyn- Audrey Hepburn-grandma," is how she describes it - her ode to life growing up in small-town Utah with Loretta.
I paint every day by a cupcake store. How bad could it be?
–Stephanie Deer
"It's like a warm blanket," Deer said. "It's happy memories. It's like when you were growing up in your home town, you couldn't wait to get out and now that I'm older I realize how great I had it."
So there -- wearing a vintage Toni Todd dress, a vintage apron, white gloves, pearls, heels and a beehive hairdo - she paints.
She says she feels very lucky, Susan Boyle-lucky, because happenstance has taken her career here, to her little slice of Mayberry.
"I paint every day by a cupcake store," Deer said. "How bad could it be?"
