With Randee Levine it is hard to tell what comes first, philosophy or art. Levine’s art is an extension of herself, a physical manifestation of the psychological process and understanding that has brought meaning and awareness to her personal life, and has become central to her professional life […]
To start out 2016 we checked in with some Utah artists to see what they are up to in the New Year. We’ll be running these short features throughout the month. When you think “Connie Borup” you think “nature” and often “trees,” though that theme has morphed in […]
Other than as categories, art terms like ‘representational’ and ‘realistic’ aren’t very helpful. The weightlessly floating, elongated figures of Byzantine mosaics ‘realistically represented’ the spiritual truth so important to those who lived in the dark age that followed the fall of Rome, that souls and eternity mattered more […]
Liberty Blake makes music with visual art. The UK native turned UT resident blends together pieces of found, salvaged and purchased paper to create works of simplistic profundity. Her current show at Phillips, in which more than 20 new works are displayed in the downstairs Dibble Gallery, are […]
“As a sculptor, my concern is for form,” Larry Elsner wrote in 1977, “a maddening search for the unity of space and mass.” An Idaho native and longtime Utah State University professor, Elsner would always choose form over function, regardless of the medium in which he was working: […]
Denis Phillips is every sort of artist: he flows comfortably between abstraction and realism, moves easily from the Renaissance of restoration work and making frames to the Space Age of creating his own computer-generated prints and synthesizer music. “I like the change,” he once told me of […]
“You two just keep getting better,” Denis Phillips observed Wednesday afternoon at a walkthrough of the terrific new show by Mark Knudsen and Leslie Thomas. And he’s an artist who doesn’t hand out compliments readily. The public seems to agree: five paintings have sold already including a 24”x […]
The works of the late Harry Taylor, now on exhibit at Phillips Gallery, teem with energetic life and vitality. With his unique sense of brevity, playful sense of humor and dynamic skills as a woodcarver (he managed to keep working even after he was diagnosed with ALS), Taylor […]
Edward Bateman is once again a finalist in a major global competition. The edgy digital artist and University of Utah professor jets to Cardiff, England, on Sunday for an exhibition and talk for the important Lumen Prize (www.lumenprize.com), one of 25 people chosen from about 700 submissions. Better […]
According to Wikipedia: The hippocampus (named after its resemblance to the seahorse, from the Greek hippos meaning “horse” and kampos meaning “sea monster”) is a major component of the brains of humans and other vertebrates. It belongs to the limbic system and plays important roles in the consolidation […]
Josanne Glass in her Salt Lake City studio. Photo by Shawn Rossiter. Comfort zones. We all have them. Some get stuck in them. Others use them to their best advantage. Some, who may be the type to be the most regulated by regimen, habit, routine, and ritual, may […]
Ed Bateman in his office at the University of Utah. Photo by Simon Blundell Istill have a card on my refrigerator from Phillips Gallery from 2005 that I am not ready to stop looking at — a computerized montage on Ralph Waldo Emerson by Edward Bateman with an […]
This past weekend was a celebration of abstract art in Salt Lake City, with the top tier of the state’s abstractionists exhibiting at Salt Lake’s Rio Gallery. This dazzling exhibit of the brightest and best includes Dave Malone, who is also featured in a solo exhibit this month […]
“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 […]
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 […]
Waterscapes by Connie Borup opening January 17th at Salt Lake City’s Phillips Gallery once again demonstrates the power of resurrection. Not just the renewal of nature, but the regenerating endurance of Borup’s idiom. Working in oils on medium-sized canvases, Borup continues to explore nature, and how little we […]
There are limits to the extent that the artist can let us see through his eyes, in a literal sense, but speaking metaphorically, every artist has the potential to share their universe of artistic vision, wonders of meaningful emotion, and universal contribution to cognition. This is the goal […]
