The Great Kinyon
Who Was The Great Kinyon?
Before we begin, I think there's something important I need to explain.
The Great Kinyon was never a real person.
His name was Dell Kinyon Taylor, and for most of his life that's exactly who people believed they knew. He was a man, a husband, a friend, and for more than twenty years, an art teacher at Ben Lomond High School in Ogden, Utah. Thousands of students knew him simply as "Mr. Taylor."
But Dell would often tell me there were two people living inside him.
There was Dell, the one who taught school, took out the trash, paid the bills, and lived the life everyone expected. Then there was Kinyon. Kinyon was the maker. He was the one who could say what Dell couldn't, ask questions Dell couldn't ask, and create without concern for what anyone else might think. It wasn't another identity. It was the part of himself he protected throughout his life.
For more than sixty years, Kinyon quietly built a world unlike anything I've ever experienced. A place where he made anything he wanted. He was a master of the process, a true maker of things.
Not because he wanted recognition.
Not because he hoped to become famous.
He simply believed making beautiful things was one of the greatest ways a person could spend a life. When I asked him how he had accomplished so much, he smiled and replied,
"All of this is magic, my dear boy... real magic. And its simple ingredient is love."
Who Am I?
People often ask why a Master Arborist would dedicate his life to preserving art.
The truth is, I don't think I've changed professions as much as people imagine.
As a consulting arborist, my responsibility wasn't simply caring for trees. It was understanding something that couldn't speak for itself. I had to recognize its history, understand the environment that shaped it, identify the threats against it, and then give it a voice before someone made a decision that could never be undone.
Today, I find myself doing much the same thing. Only now, instead of speaking for trees, I'm speaking for the life and work of my dear friend, Dell Kinyon Taylor.
Dell wasn't my grandfather or a distant relative. He was one of my closest friends whom I met through my grandfather one of his prior students. I first walked through the doors of his home when I was eleven years old. Years later, after caring for him through the final chapter of his life, he entrusted me with his home and everything inside it.
I'm not an art historian, nor do I pretend to be one. What I do understand is how to study a living system, recognize its relationships, preserve its integrity, and protect it for future generations.
Like the Lorax who spoke for the trees because they had no tongues, I now find myself speaking for a body of work that can no longer tell its own story. My responsibility isn't to change it or reinterpret it. It's simply to make sure it has the opportunity to be seen, understood, and preserved the way its maker intended.
Like the Lorax who spoke for the trees because they had no tongues, I now find myself doing the same for something entirely different. Maybe that's all I've ever really done. The only difference now is what I'm listening to.
So let me ask you...
When you look at these things, what do they say to you?
What is This House?
I don't know if I can honestly answer that question.
I've spent years trying to understand it, and I'm still not convinced I have the right words.
The Front Doors
People throughout Ogden, Utah have wondered about this place for decades. Former students still stop and tell me they always wanted to know what was on the other side of the front doors. Neighbors slowed down as they drove past. Children pointed it out to one another. There has always been something about this home that quietly demanded your attention.
I think Dell knew exactly what he was doing.
He once told me he built the front doors for one very simple reason. He wanted people to know that “things happen here.”-
I've thought about that statement more times than I can count.
The longer I live here, the less I think he was talking about the house itself.
I've watched people walk through these doors and completely lose track of time. I've watched them laugh, cry, stand in silence, and struggle to explain what they're experiencing. I've done the very same thing myself, sometimes… daily.
Somewhere over sixty years, this stopped becoming the place where Dell lived and quietly became part of the life he was creating. Every room tells another story. Every corner asks another question. Even after all these years, the house continues to reveal things that were hiding in plain sight.
So maybe the better question was never what's behind the front doors?
Maybe it's the same question people have been asking all along.
What happened here?
What Is This Project?
For a long time, I struggled with how to explain what you're looking at.
Calling it an art collection has never felt right. It doesn't describe what happened here, nor does it explain why I've dedicated my life to preserving it.
This project isn't about proving that Dell was a remarkable artist. It's about understanding the life of a man who quietly spent more than ninety years learning, making, questioning, and refining his relationship with the world around him. Every painting, every journal, every photograph, every object, and every room reveals another part of that story. My responsibility now is to understand it well enough that future generations have the same opportunity to experience it.
That means documenting every object, every letter, every journal entry, every photograph, and every connection I can find before time has the opportunity to erase them. It's slow work. At times it can be overwhelming. More often than not, it feels less like organizing artwork and more like an archaeological excavation, where every discovery changes my understanding of everything surrounding it.
As you move throughout this website, I think it's important to remember one simple fact.
Everything you're about to see was made by one man: the paintings, jewelry, stained glass, tapestries, carvings, photography, leatherwork, clothing, sculpture, gardens, architecture, and countless other works that refuse to fit neatly into any one category. Even many of the materials used to create them were first gathered, grown, trapped, carved, polished, woven, or shaped by his own hands.
When I first began documenting all of this, I found myself asking the same question everyone else asks.
How did one man have enough time?
The deeper I've gone into the project, the less interested I've become in answering that question. Instead, I've found myself asking another.
What kind of life produces something like this?
I don't know that I'll ever fully answer it.
Maybe that's why this project exists.
This website is simply one part of that journey. It's where I can share what I'm learning, document new discoveries as they unfold, and invite you into a story that, until now, almost no one has had the opportunity to experience.
I don't know where all of this will eventually lead. I only know that something extraordinary happened inside this home, and I believe it's worth preserving.
I've come to realize that this project isn't really about finding answers. It's about living with the questions long enough that they begin to change us. The more time I spend here, the less I wonder how one man created all of this and the more I wonder what kind of life allows something like it to exist in the first place. Maybe the answer was never the important part.
Maybe the real gift is that we're given the opportunity to ask the question at all.
