If asked to name an artist they know something about, most people would probably reply, ‘Vincent.’ They might well defend their nomination by pointing out that he was precisely what comes to mind when someone says ‘artist.’ He was notoriously daft: inspired, driven mad by the very […]
Christmas is a time for traditions, mostly welcome, but we could do without a recent one: the culture clash that’s come to be known as the ‘Christmas Wars.’ The pattern will be familiar to anyone who has followed the national news, or for that matter ever been bullied, […]
“Money doesn’t talk; it swears” — Bob Dylan Money does a lot of things, and like swearing, they can be good or bad. Consider twenty-first century art, for example. Money attracts talent, and with unprecedented amounts of money flowing into the art market, there is so much wonderful […]
A few years ago, a Snow College graduate was nearly dropped from the BFA program at Weber State for submitting drawings that resembled photographic double exposures. In one, a woman had two heads; in another, an ear of one face burst through another’s cheek. Ironically, they would […]
There’s an old rule-of-thumb in galleries, more applicable than ever these days: ‘The more text on the wall, the worse the art.’ Without an injection of extraneous text, much of today’s art would offer viewers little for their trouble. But the rule cuts both ways, and Fifteen, the […]
It’s often said that fans confuse the characters in movies with the personalities of the celebrities who play them. Something similar must happen with art and artists. Surely no one was surprised to learn that Picasso, bawdiest of artists, was a shameless womanizer, but how many of Thomas […]
Once again, Saltgrass Printmakers has mounted a show that everyone in the Utah art community could profit from seeing, that UMFA or UMOCA might well feature for a season. It’s not just that Wayne Kimball and Bob Kleinschmidt are emeritus heads of two of Utah’s foremost print departments—Kimball […]
One of the best known, most extraordinary photographs of the heavens ever taken is called the Hubble Deep Field. It was made by pointing the orbiting Hubble telescope, surely one of the greatest achievements in human history, into a tiny segment of space, about 1/30 the area of […]
The Gaze: glass half-full . . . If you wanted to demonstrate that there is such a thing as a male gaze, different from the way a woman looks at the world, you might assemble pairs of photographs, one in each pair displaying a man’s perspective, one a […]
In 1968, the Scottish-Canadian experimental filmmaker Norman McLaren found a new use for an optical printer, a device that copies motion picture films. Any moving image will consist of a sequence of still images, each briefly flashed before the eye while the mind builds a version of the […]
The backpack is ubiquitous in twenty-first century America: it is, in fact, one of the few accessories that comfortably crosses both gender and generational lines. They vary in color and ornament, just enough for you to know your own, but they are close to interchangeable. Yet this one, […]
The problem with contemporary art, post-modern art, call it what temporary label you will, the problem with new art is always that it doesn’t look like art. Two of the signature schools of late modernism—found art and assemblage—exemplify this dilemma. How can a jumble, not just of familiar […]
Somewhere along his path, while growing up in his native Utah or later, studying illustration, painting, and graphic design at the prestigious Pacific Northwest College of Art, Anthony Granato acquired a genuinely idiosyncratic approach to making art. It’s not unusual for an artist to seek out vintage frames […]
The cover of the forthcoming New Yorker magazine invokes a familiar image: a blonde woman in a nightgown reacts in terror to the sight of a giant face at her window. It’s Fay Wray and King Kong, of course, but with a twist: the giant eyeball peering in […]
The new Whitespace gallery, across Wall Avenue from the Union Station in Ogden, opened with an impressive array of artworks emphasizing noteworthy materials rather than familiar names or genres. For instance, photographer Koh Sang Woo knows that documentary photographs are old news; his digitally manipulated color images, like […]
Art doesn’t ask questions: people do. So when Salt Lake Community College professor Lynn Kipatrick first saw the ‘blind’ drawings by John Sproul that form the visual half of their joint show at the City Library, questions came to mind as part of her response. Fortunately, Kilpatrick […]
Watercolor is perhaps the most versatile paint medium, its range running from the most ephemeral, barely perceptible stain all the way to the intensity and illusionism of oils, with an infinite register of effects between. While it would be absurd to say there are only two ways to […]
