SALT LAKE CITY — For many devout Mormons, Utah’s capital city is important mainly as a setting for the jewel that really matters: Temple Square at the city’s center. Brigham Young, the pioneer leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, laid out the urban grid with street numbers starting at the temple. The secular world was thus defined by the sacred core.

But now a hugely ambitious, $1 billion church-financed redevelopment project near the temple, called City Creek Center, and a wave of recent church property purchases in the vicinity are prompting a new debate inside the church community and out over where the line between culture and economics should be drawn.

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Painter, whose mural will adorn City Creek development, defies stereotypes.

Painter David Meikle’s small basement studio is void of any natural light. Eschewing titles about art greats such as Caravaggio or J.M.W. Turner, his bookshelves instead hold volume after volume about aviation and sci-fi movie set illustration.

You won’t find a John Coltrane or Mozart CD in his rack, but loads of Peter Gabriel, U2 and Rush. And his painting starts at 9 p.m., once his four children are fast asleep.

Meikle, a 40-year-old Salt Lake City landscape painter, betrays almost every standard trait the public expects of fine artists.

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