Ehren Clark studied art history at both the University of Utah and the University of Reading in the UK. For a decade he lived in Salt Lake City and worked as a professional writer until his untimely death in 2017.
There are two essential driving forces to the work of Woody Shepherd, but instead of an interrogation of which came first, we shall assume that in the context of his work they are married for an artistic synergy that results in the incredible and fantastical — two adjectives […]
“I focus on the aspect of art that is the mechanism,” says Anne Cummings. “The mechanism of art can be a transformation, a transcendence, and through that transformative process is healing,” she says. “Through channeling different memories — the process of creating art — there is opportunity […]
In a January 2014 article Catherine Craft reassessed a 1970 Whitney Museum exhibition by African American artist Melvin Edwards asserting, “A reconsideration of Edward’s exhibition reveals its seminal place in art of the period as both an incisive response to the most radical forms of sculpture and installation […]
Susan Kirby became an artist not by any decision but by a realization, an epiphany. She was 19, in Paris for a two-year study program, practicing a self-taught style she felt insecure about. A young artist-to-be needs validation and Kirby realized hers in a grand manner in Paris. Nothing […]
“Modernism, that is the ‘mainstream’ evoked by the history of books—the most coherent version of which is Clement Greenberg’s, but there are others—is seen as progressing in a straight line from Manet to abstract expressionism and beyond. The modernist interpretation of modern art, which is an extraction that […]
How we present ourselves, in public and in private, has a huge bearing on how we define ourselves as human beings. In our modern society presentation involves the clothes we wear, the make-up we use and the way we style our hair; but it also extends to external […]
Place is not a thing, it is not even a space, it is an experience. An experience that, through the artist’s hand, can be shared. This is the concept that drives “Spirit of Place,” featuring works by Darryl Erdmann, Mark Knudsen and Paul Vincent Bernard, currently up at […]
“My paintings come out of my love/hate relationship with Modernism,” says Utah artist Steven Stradley. “Modernism pigeon-holed itself, I think. [Clement] Greenberg pigeon-holed it as he had all of those ideas about painting as a flat surface, ideas about painting super-imposed upon the work that maybe did not […]
What is the nature of a narrative? It has a beginning, it has a development that involves content, often conflict, ideally growth and progression, and it has an end. The best narratives are the ones that have an end that does not end, that through our experience of […]
Light has been many things to artists, from the scientific explorations of the Post-Impressionists, to the primary place it took in the Modernist agenda of formalism and even its place in contemporary atmospheres of total transience. What are we to think, then, when a contemporary artist calls something […]
Think of Alice in Wonderland and the party with the Mad Hatter; or the Cheshire Cat, The White Rabbit, the roses and the flowers, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, and the smoking Caterpillar. These characters do strange things in strange ways to Alice, who never seems affected by […]
“My art stems from my innate desire to make connection with my fellow human beings,” says ceramicist Suzanne Storer. Working out of her Ogden studio, the potter turned sculptor creates uniquely definitive and characteristic wall sculpture. The line drawings that had previously graced her platters and functional pottery have […]
Alexander Hraefn Morris says he recognizes a spiritual presence within him, and we can see this expressed in one of the artist’s more direct works of abstraction: “It Takes Note and Attempts to Understand” is a 9 x 3 foot triptych that abstractly maps the Cottonwood Heights area […]
Although landscape may be the signature subject for Utah painters, there are as many approaches to painting the land as there are painters who paint it. Many of these approaches derive from straightforward methodology, revealing nothing more than the rocks and the hills and the sky being painted. […]
When Hadley Rampton travels she is drawn, she says, “to the old places. There is history there. When I travel that is what really intrigues me, that is what really excites me… and I also really love history. I want to get to what the truth of […]
