Ehren Clark studied art history at both the University of Utah and the University of Reading in the UK. For a decade he lived in Salt Lake City and worked as a professional writer until his untimely death in 2017.
Lindsay Frei’s oeuvre, both past and present, has concentrated on still life and portraiture. It has always had an astonishing sense of reality, a reality that is not simply a technical approach to painting, but a total reality, one that captures the beautiful in the nuances of the […]
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 […]
Edmund Burke, at the height of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, an era defined by learning and the intellect, began to look at the wonders of nature and considered the value of human sensibilities, not merely as means for scientific or artistic investigation, but for their own […]
In his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” Charles Baudelaire stated that ‘modernity’ required, “above all a man of the world to fulfill. He has every-where sought after the fugitive, fleeting beauty of present-day life, the distinguishing character of that quality which, with the reader’s kind permission, […]
The nature of perception, the artist’s vision and viewer responsiveness is a topic that concerns all of art, in every facet, from every place and time, from every artist, and from every viewer. From a visitor to a gallery or museum in Salt Lake City to a pedestrian […]
Connectivity is an abstract term, a function that acts prolifically in multitudinous ways in all functioning of daily living. Through it, by connecting seemingly distant or unrelated terms or ideas, we create new meanings. Making art with meaning that is fundamentally based on connectivity requires a subject for […]
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 […]
There are two essential driving forces to the work of Woody Shepherd, but instead of an interrogation of which came first, we shall assume that in the context of his work they are married for an artistic synergy that results in the incredible and fantastical — two adjectives […]
“I focus on the aspect of art that is the mechanism,” says Anne Cummings. “The mechanism of art can be a transformation, a transcendence, and through that transformative process is healing,” she says. “Through channeling different memories — the process of creating art — there is opportunity […]
In a January 2014 article Catherine Craft reassessed a 1970 Whitney Museum exhibition by African American artist Melvin Edwards asserting, “A reconsideration of Edward’s exhibition reveals its seminal place in art of the period as both an incisive response to the most radical forms of sculpture and installation […]
Susan Kirby became an artist not by any decision but by a realization, an epiphany. She was 19, in Paris for a two-year study program, practicing a self-taught style she felt insecure about. A young artist-to-be needs validation and Kirby realized hers in a grand manner in […]
“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 […]
How we present ourselves, in public and in private, has a huge bearing on how we define ourselves as human beings. In our modern society presentation involves the clothes we wear, the make-up we use and the way we style our hair; but it also extends to external […]
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, […]
“My paintings come out of my love/hate relationship with Modernism,” says Utah artist Steven Stradley. “Modernism pigeon-holed itself, I think. [Clement] Greenberg pigeon-holed it as he had all of those ideas about painting as a flat surface, ideas about painting super-imposed upon the work that maybe did not […]
What is the nature of a narrative? It has a beginning, it has a development that involves content, often conflict, ideally growth and progression, and it has an end. The best narratives are the ones that have an end that does not end, that through our experience of […]
Light has been many things to artists, from the scientific explorations of the Post-Impressionists, to the primary place it took in the Modernist agenda of formalism and even its place in contemporary atmospheres of total transience. What are we to think, then, when a contemporary artist calls something […]
Think of Alice in Wonderland and the party with the Mad Hatter; or the Cheshire Cat, The White Rabbit, the roses and the flowers, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, and the smoking Caterpillar. These characters do strange things in strange ways to Alice, who never seems affected […]
“My art stems from my innate desire to make connection with my fellow human beings,” says ceramicist Suzanne Storer. Working out of her Ogden studio, the potter turned sculptor creates uniquely definitive and characteristic wall sculpture. The line drawings that had previously graced her platters and functional pottery have […]
