Recently deceased Utah artists remembered by their friends and colleagues, published in 15 Bytes, Utah’s art magazine.
A quiet man with a sincere smile and a great handshake, Sam Stewart was a wizard financier, admittedly “hooked” on stocks but unattached to money itself. Instead, he gloried in what he could make money do for nonprofit organizations, to aid museums and change the lives of artists, to further […]
(This article was written while Annie Blake was in hospice. On Dec. 16 her husband announced on Instagram that she had passed.) “How could it be possible to take in all the sad stories and become big enough to hold them all? Or to compress them […]
Friends hoped Fred Adams would go on forever. Not in order to keep having grandiose ideas like that of founding a world-class Shakespearean festival in the middle of the Utah desert (and then bringing that dream to fruition in a big, Tony- and Emmy-award-winning way), but just to […]
“The strange and disconnected are the stuff of my creations.” – Marcee Blackerby Like Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, Salt Lake City author and artist Marcee Blackerby, born in Castle Dale 75 years ago, followed her star and left this planet around 1:15 a.m. on Dec. 30, 2019. […]
Bob Kleinschmidt, who taught printmaking at the University of Utah for 30 years, died peacefully Friday night, Aug. 2, at home surrounded by his family following an extended illness. His friend and colleague Joseph Marotta remembers him as the “Buddhist master of the Art and Art History Department […]
“Life is too short to eat bad food,” Robert Lewis Bliss, FAIA, always declared as he appreciatively dug a fork into a small plate of seared prawns in a Zürsun yellow split pea puree at Manoli’s fine Greek restaurant near Liberty Park; or when he hoisted a thin […]
Utah painter and sculptor Franz M. Johansen, who died Aug. 23 in Provo, found his artistic mission on an LDS church mission in the British Isles. There, his wife Josie Morris confirms, he learned about William Blake, who as a boy said he had seen God through a […]
Early on in our relationship, Tom Alder had to convince me on an important point: a lack of evidence should not get in the way of a good story. Evidence should be sought, Tom conceded, arguments for plausibility laid out, but ultimately, if nothing disproved a story or […]
When he was in his early 20s, (an age when the main accomplishment of many of us is drinking a lot of beer) Patrick Moore Hoagland was awarded the Thousand Points of Light Award for exceptional service to this community, by then President George H. W. Bush. Presidents […]
Photo by Nathalie van Empel, 2012. Courtesy BYU Museum of Art. The term “Renaissance man” is heard a lot, but Paul Anderson, who died suddenly the night of March 23, certainly ranks among them. An artist, architect, educator, curator and composer, he restored historic LDS buildings; sang in […]
In a 2002 piece for 15 Bytes, art historian and U of U Dean Bob Olpin wrote that the Springville Museum’s Spring Salon contained “one of the finest Bill Whitaker pretty girl paintings I’ve ever seen.” That was saying a great deal, considering the skill of this artist, whom […]
by Frank McEntire “Whimsical and humorous or elegant and monumental, Richard Johnston’s sculptures are always refined. Seemingly unyielding metals are finessed to draw out their cool, flexible, even fluid character. With considerable attention to detail, the artist delights in inventive points of articulation: notches cut in the metal, […]
Whenever I think of Suzanne Simpson, I think of sunshine. And on learning of her passing from breast cancer on Nov. 3, I find that I still do. We first met more than 20 years ago, when I was working at the photo mecca of Borge Andersen & […]
Edit someone’s words long enough and their voice begins to seep into your own. For 10 years, I worked with Ehren Clark, one of the most passionate voices in Utah’s art community, and his many verbal mannerisms — his cadences, syntax and lexicon — became so familiar, so […]
Renowned fantasy artist James C. Christensen passed away Jan. 8 after a long battle with cancer. He was 74. Born Sept. 26, 1942, in Culver City, California, Christensen studied at UCLA and BYU where he later earned his MFA and taught from 1976-1997. Artist and BYU Professor Joseph […]
