Meet the Artist: Jason Workman
painting Walt Disney
Navy vet. Electrician. Dad of four. Sunday dungeon master.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, Jason Workman paints.
He started with scale.
Jason grew up in the mountains of Utah and Wyoming — the kind of country that makes a person feel small in a way that’s more comforting than it sounds.
That never really left him.
You can still find him out in it, hand pressed against a canyon wall, looking for whatever’s been sitting there for a hundred and fifty million years.
Then he traded the mountains for the sea.
Four years in the Navy. He talks about it the way a painter would — not the schedule or the ranks, but the sights, the sounds, the smell of it. The whole thing went straight into his palette and stayed there.
Then he built a life out of two things at once.
In college, Jason studied 3D animation.
That’s where he found Disney’s “nine old men” — the core group of master animators who figured out how to make drawings feel alive. Not just move. Live.
What caught him wasn’t only the artistry. It was the machinery underneath it. Disney was building systems. Wiring art into engineering, over and over, until a drawn mouse could blink and a mechanical bird could sing.
Jason went and did the same thing with his own life.
He earned his design degree while working full-time as an electrician. Today he designs automation and electrical control systems — the wiring that makes things move.And whenever there’s room for it, he paints. Oil, mostly. Plein air when the weather cooperates. Portraits. The occasional quirky still life that makes you look twice.
He’s the guy kneeling on hot asphalt at a chalk festival, working a portrait into pavement he knows will be gone by the next rain.
Why Walt Disney?
Ask him and the answer isn’t about the mouse.
It’s that Disney proved art and engineering could live in the same person — which is the only
way Jason has ever known how to live.
So he isn’t painting a stranger. He’s painting the guy who drew his map.
He’s working in oil on canvas panel, and he’s after the thing underneath the icon: not the
empire, but the person who kept going after the empire was taken from him the first time.
What he’s proudest of building?
It isn’t a painting.
Ask Jason what he’s most proud of and he’ll say his four kids.
Sundays, the whole family is around one table playing Dungeons & Dragons. Sometimes he’s the one running the game — inventing the world, keeping the story moving, letting everyone else be the hero of it.
A full-time career. A second one in painting. Four kids and a game to run.
None of it holds together without his wife. She’s the steady hand behind all of it.
He says art is his calm in the storm. And, if things go well, a giggle along the way.
What This Is All About
Jason is one of 18 local artists creating portraits for:
Influencers Over Time — Part 3: Builders + Titans
This five-part exhibition is inspired by TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people of the 20th century — exploring the people whose ideas, ambition, and decisions shaped the world we live in today.
Influencers Over Time is a collaborative art and storytelling project exploring the people who shaped the modern world. It does not ask who was right or wrong nearly as much as it asks what it means to change the course of history — and how each of us is shaping the future through the influence we choose to have.
October 23–25, 2026 at The Studio · 4750 W 800 N · West Point, Utah
Admission is free — reserve your spot below!
Want the story behind the man Jason is painting? The train ride that made Walt Disney
