The Drying of the Great Salt Lake

“The Drying of the Great Salt Lake” reflects the fragile and changing landscape of one of Utah’s most vital natural ecosystems. Rather than portraying the Great Salt Lake literally, the painting translates its ecological decline into an emotional landscape through layered textures, fragmented forms, and earthy, muted colors.

Expansive blue-gray passages evoke the lake’s remaining waters, while exposed browns, ochres, and dusty neutrals suggest the increasingly visible lakebed and exposed microbialites. Dense, fractured areas of deep red, brown, and black convey environmental stress, deterioration, and habitat loss, contrasting with traces of turquoise and white that recall water, salt, and the resilience of lingering life.

Color relationships throughout the composition carry symbolic meaning. Vibrant pink at the top of the artwork refers to the brine shrimp (cysts) populations that sustain millions of migratory birds, including the American White Pelican and Eared Grebe. The Yellow form in the lake represent Utah’s aquaculture industry and its connection to the lake, while red signifies ecological danger, shrinking habitat, and the growing threat of coyotes reaching bird nesting islands as receding waters create land bridges.
Subtle S.O.S. references are embedded within the composition as a visual distress signal, reinforcing the urgency of the lake’s condition.

The rough surfaces and overlapping layers suggest erosion, exposure, and the gradual transformation of a once-vast body of water.

Ultimately, the work is both a reflection and a warning—a reminder that the drying of the Great Salt Lake is not simply the loss of water, but the potential loss of habitat, wildlife, ecological balance, livelihoods, and an irreplaceable part of Utah’s natural identity. Through abstraction, the painting invites viewers to consider the interconnected relationship between water, wildlife, industry, and conservation, and the consequences of allowing this unique ecosystem to disappear.

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Aatmica Ojha is an abstract expressionist painter based in Murray, Utah, whose work treats color as a language for the emotions we rarely speak aloud. Born in India in 1989, she was making greeting cards for friends by the age of four — an early instinct to turn feeling into something she could give away. She earned a BS in Fashion & Apparel Design (with distinction) from Bangalore University and spent two years as an in-house boutique designer before returning, in 2016, to her first love: painting.

Working primarily in fluid, poured abstraction, Aatmica is drawn to color psychology and to the moment a private feeling becomes something others can stand inside. Her practice has always reached past the edge of the canvas. Over the past decade she has directed it toward people on the margins of attention — cancer patients, differently-abled artists, survivors of neurological illness, and underserved youth — donating between half and all of her sale proceeds through partners including the National Breast Cancer Foundation (U.S.) and the Cancer Patients Aid Association (India). Her painting Heart of Hope hangs at Intermountain Hospital in Riverton, Utah, and her work is held in the private collection of the Taj Hotels, India.

Just as often, her studio is a classroom or a gallery floor. Through the “Art Literacy Program” and “Together We Are Stronger” at Viewmont Elementary, she has guided more than 500 children in making art about unity, and she leads healing-centered workshops, live painting, and talks for adults moving through grief and isolation. Across all of it runs one conviction: that art can heal, empower, and draw us back toward one another.