Fifty is a big anniversary. Whether a golden anniversary for a couple, or a company marking half a century of endurance and adaptation. Any arts organization that reaches fifty years has something to crow about—a record of having weathered changing tastes, uncertain economies, and the thousand quiet challenges that wear at any creative enterprise. What, then, do we make of an artist and his studio? That relationship can be every bit as intimate as a marriage, as productive as any business, as defining as any institution. A studio becomes both witness and collaborator, absorbing paint along with struggle, habit, and reinvention. For fifty years, Randall Lake has haunted the top floor of Guthrie Studios in downtown Salt Lake City. Before he gives it up for good, he is opening the doors one last time.

An American abroad in Paris studying art, Lake encountered two LDS missionaries, converted to the faith, married a Utah woman, and soon found himself in Salt Lake City studying under Alvin Gittins at the University of Utah. It was an era when a generation of ambitious young artists were beginning to shape what contemporary art in Utah might become, and Lake found his place among them. That place became Guthrie.

Built in 1890, the J.A. Fritsch Building is a three-story structure in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It began as home to the Fritsch Investment Company and early residential boarding, then passed through the hands of a dry cleaner, a Swedish grocery, and other tenants before Guthrie Bicycle moved in during the 1930s and stayed for eighty years—long enough to give the building the name it still carries. Artists began taking up residence in the 1970s, and they have remained, outlasting even the bicycle shop, through ownership changes and the arrival of Fice Boutique on the ground floor. The building has always attracted people with somewhere to be.

By 1981, the Guthrie’s studio community was vital enough that the Salt Lake Art Center organized a studio tour of the upper floors, drawing visitors through the spaces of painters and makers for the price of lunch and a five-dollar ticket. The names on that tour roster read now like a roll call of what Utah art was about to become: Maureen O’Hara Ure, John Erickson, Bonnie Sucec, Meredith Gregg, Steve Dawson—artists who would go on to shape the state’s visual culture for decades. Lake was already among them, and none of them knew yet quite how much ground they would cover.

Over time, Lake expanded into four interconnected rooms that became as much salon as studio, carrying something of a 19th-century sensibility. The rooms grew layered with canvases, shelves crowded with books and objects, traces of decades visible in every corner. It became a habitat as much as a workspace.

(Salt Lake City photographer Portia Snow visited in 2013 and created this photo essay for 15 Bytes)

From those rooms came luminous still lifes whose humble subjects—a teacup, a vase, a carefully arranged table—became studies in light and tenderness. Portraits emerged with both psychological depth and formal command. Landscapes shimmered with atmosphere. Through every phase, Lake distinguished himself as one of Utah’s more technically gifted painters. His later work became more openly autobiographical—marked by grief, conflict, anger, and spiritual reckoning. If the earlier paintings revealed his eye, these revealed his interior life. Elegant surfaces gave way to something more urgent and exposed. The studio held all of it: beauty and fracture, refinement and confession.

For more than two decades, Lake regularly opened that world to the public. His studio became a destination—part exhibition, part gathering place, part glimpse into the life of a working painter. In recent years those openings grew less frequent, as Lake increasingly divided his time between Salt Lake City and Spring City, where Utah’s small but resilient arts colony offered a different rhythm: quieter, slower, better suited to reflection. What began as a second home gradually became home.

Now he has decided to make that move complete.

Before closing the Guthrie chapter for good, he is opening the studio one final time—an invitation not merely to see paintings, but to step inside one of Utah art’s enduring creative spaces, to witness the rooms where half a century of work took shape. (More than one artist will be tempted to take measurements and imagine their own dream space).

There is something fitting in the timing. You can, in a sense, bracket May with Randall Lake: beginning in Salt Lake City, among the rooms where his long career unfolded, and ending in Spring City during Heritage Days, where another chapter begins.

Not many artists get a fifty-year anniversary with a studio. Fewer still leave one having fully inhabited it.

Randall Lake in his Guthrie studio in 2010.

Randall Lake: The Final Toast
May 1–3, 2026
Reception: Friday, May 1, 5–9 pm
Open Studio: Saturday, May 2, 10 am–6 pm; Sunday, May 3, 10 am–6 pm

Venue: Guthrie Studios, 158 East 200 South, 3rd Floor, Salt Lake City, Utah 84111

15 Bytes

UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.