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Beautiful Books Rich in Substance; You wouldn''t be disappointed if you judged these books of photographs, paintings and images by their covers, but it''s the content inside that makes them stand out.

Article Excerpt
Byline: Stephen Goode, INSIGHT

Some books are beautiful things but don't have much inside to recommend them. Others are rich when it comes to content, yet come up short when judged by looks. Insight has chosen five published in 2003 that score high in both categories.

Two are books packed with photographs - one of pictures from all over the globe, with a few from the universe in general; the other contains nothing but photographs of the people and their homes in a small portion of the mountains of North Carolina. A third presents the work of an underappreciated American painter. A fourth takes up the gardens and culture of China, and the fifth displays close-up images of moths, stupefying in their variety and complexity.

* One of the big mistakes often made about serious art in America is to assume that it's done in New York City and Los Angeles but nowhere else in between. There is good painting to be seen in Albuquerque and in Miami, in St. Louis and in Minneapolis, and in small-town America. And in Utah, too, as In Natural Light: Paintings by VaLoy Eaton shows on its every page. Eaton is a friend (and cousin) of Orrin Hatch, Utah's senior senator, who owns several of the artist's paintings and wrote a foreword to this book. The introduction is by Vern G. Swanson, director of the Springville Museum of Art in Utah.

Eaton is a landscapist of considerable skill who is particularly good at rendering snow and winter scenes. He's good at people, too. His American West is the familiar West of wide-open spaces; men, women and children on horseback; and abandoned farm buildings and machinery. He also does scenes from Mormon history. And light, very often the luminous light of an autumn morning, plays a big role in Eaton's paintings. In much of his work, he shares with his viewers what it must have been like to grow up in a very rural and beautiful part of the country, and to love the place deeply.

The artist is quoted in the book's introduction as describing his work this way: "I come from a family of pioneers, people who built the farms and ranches that spread out over the valley. Here's where I was born and raised, and this is my favorite place to paint. It's remote, has great sunlight spilling across a wide-open valley, and has all different types of landscapes. There are...