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.
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 by […]
“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 […]
Alexander Hraefn Morris says he recognizes a spiritual presence within him, and we can see this expressed in one of the artist’s more direct works of abstraction: “It Takes Note and Attempts to Understand” is a 9 x 3 foot triptych that abstractly maps the Cottonwood Heights area […]
Although landscape may be the signature subject for Utah painters, there are as many approaches to painting the land as there are painters who paint it. Many of these approaches derive from straightforward methodology, revealing nothing more than the rocks and the hills and the sky being painted. […]
When Hadley Rampton travels she is drawn, she says, “to the old places. There is history there. When I travel that is what really intrigues me, that is what really excites me… and I also really love history. I want to get to what the truth of […]
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 […]
Watching art and life come together in a way that seems nothing short of naturally organic is one of the joys of being an art critic. Aaron Ashcraft, whose works are on exhibit at Finch Lane’s West Gallery this month, brings his craft to full life-like fruition with […]
What should artists do about styles they don’t like? Namon Bills says embrace them.
“I control what I can control and then I try to manage what I can’t control,” says Utah County artist Amy Tolk Richards. Richards is speaking on both an artistic level and on a personal level: as a mother, spouse, and human being. Richards’ canvases are simple and […]
It might be easiest to call Tom Bettin a painter, but his studio practice is just as dependent on printmaking, sophisticated forms of collage and other multi-media approaches, making it difficult to define just “what kind of art” Bettin makes. Whatever the mechanics, it is art that transcends […]
“Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty,” said Edmund Burke in his seminal “Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.” Burke might have appreciated the work of Chauncey Secrist as few are able: for it is easy to look […]
Andrea Jensen is a masterful articulator of boundaries — not the pretty kind, the ones you were told not to venture outside of with your crayon, but the boundaries where phenomena collide at force, where humanity is compelled to acknowledge itself. These boundaries are “truth moments” for […]
Mondo Utah, the inaugural Utah Biennial that opened at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art last week, is all about Utah’s traditional parallel types, says museum Senior Curator of Exhibitions Aaron Moulton — the distinctive genres like landscape or outsider art that interact to form the state’s cultural […]
David Ericson says each of the three artists in his current show, “paint what they see and paint what they experience.” Views of the West, up through May 17, provides ample representation from these three contemporary landscape artists — G. Russell Case, Michael Workman and George Handrahan — […]
The large exhibit space in the back of the SLC Photo Collective is the ideal housing for Yale MA fine art graduate Albert Fallick-Wang’s large-scale photographs, lending not only the proper physical proportions, but also an allowance of space that encourages the type of expansive cognitive connection this […]
In conjunction with their current exhibition Cinematic, the CUAC in Salt Lake City is presenting three free film series featuring work by local filmmakers. With an abundance of visual imagery, ranging from black and white animation to lushly colored poetic references, these short films by Also Sisters, Jan […]
Exciting, bold, adventurous and energetic color; rich, luscious, raw and sensuous texture; lucid, mannered and eclectic form; intricate exhaustive, varied and diminutive pattern — surely a cornucopia of formal painterly elements such as this is the result, at the nine o’clock hour, of an extensively attended Gallery Stroll. […]
