Edward Bateman’s latest work makes manifest the adage that one can create mountains out of molehills — molehills made from little bits of plastic and representing real-life Utah mountains. The artist provides small models of his molehills cum mountains (or is it the reverse?) at Phillips Gallery, where a fine […]
Hadley Rampton, who paints en plein air accompanied by her dog, Phoebe, primarily in the Rocky Mountain wilderness she loves but also (sans dog) in town squares and picturesque alleyways around the world, learned a couple new lessons about (and from) Utah’s scenic backcountry during the Pandemic: that […]
Downy Doxey-Marshall introduces the baker’s dozen large oil paintings in Immerse, her current show in the Phillips’ Dibble Gallery, with a twice-relevant quotation from Pablo Picasso: The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls. The key here is “washing,” a word that […]
In “Charity,” a clichéd old man — straw hat, glasses, cane, bag of bird seed — stands in shallow water at the beach, feeding a large gull that hovers in midair to take seed from his open hand, both seemingly oblivious to the wave: a wall of water […]
Utah artists like what they do. If any of them feels tortured, they’ve kept it to themselves. Some see their art as a prayer, others feel like telling a story. Some see art as a challenge to take on. A popular gallery like Phillips can pull together three […]
The ladies and gentlemen at Phillips had a grand time bringing Spring to the main gallery for the current show – it hits you right in the solar plexus as you walk in and leaves you, well, hopeful. They do it with color, of course: screaming tangerine walls […]
“I don’t do strange stuff with Photoshop,” states Paul Dougan, who seems more interested in chatting up the printing process than discussing other aspects of his work. “If the color red is there, it’s the best the camera can do and I can do to keep it red.” […]
A feeling of almost baronial formality falls over you as you approach paintings by Heather Barron, a feeling you should straighten your clothes as you approach framed mirrors. Petits fours, anyone? In America, petits fours are received as a gift in a long, very shallow box: they’re a […]
These paintings should not be as good as they are: with their muted palette, square format and generally flat lighting, they should be boring. But are not. Patricia Kimball has never been a flashy painter, one who indulges in bright colors and virtuoso effects in her figure paintings […]
In her profile of Joseph Ostraff for the Artists of Utah publication Utah’s 15: The State’s Most Influential Artists, Laura Durham focuses on the artist’s tendency to seek engagement from others in his work — from the artists and individuals who have influenced him, to the scores of […]
What Edward Bateman does is as much in the realm of science as art — as reminiscent of Leonardo and Edison as of Michelangelo. Which is to say that unless you can grasp what he’s about on his computer, it becomes difficult to explain the results of his […]
During lunch at Kyoto, painter Oonju Chun asks, “Why do we say, ‘If I were . . .’ instead of ‘If I was . . .?”’ — one of those nitpicky English questions a writer hates to answer with “Ummmm . . .“ * But does. So, it […]
Retro Furniture Changes Colors — Chroma Gallery
In the late ’80s, Erdmann ran the Salt Lake Contemporary Gallery in downtown Salt Lake where he showed minimalist and color-field art at a time when “Mark Rothko wasn’t a household word.” Reception to the gallery was not overwhelming and it eventually closed down. Since that time, abstract art has failed to achieve a pervasive presence in Utah. The Salt Lake Art Center has had more and more exhibits highlighting contemporary art and Phillips Gallery has survived showing abstract work, but few other venues for abstract art have proven viable…
