Rebecca Pyle is a writer and an artist with work in dozens of art/literary journals, in the United States and also in journals (in the English language) in Hong Kong and the U.K. and Northern Ireland, Belgium, India, France, and Germany. She graduated from the university the Wizard of Oz adored, the University of Kansas, where she studied art and lit. See rebeccapyleartist.com.
Several decades ago the words “A stone, a leaf, an unfound door” opened Thomas Wolfe’s novel Look Homeward, Angel , suggesting that a rock and a leaf had as much importance as a door — or that a secret and invaluable door or truth could only be found, […]
All our world involves transactional borrowing, or theft. Except our sun, our landlord — who gives us what we have for free (while flames are slowly consuming his own self) — everything’s an extractive bargain, an argument settled by sharing. Earth draws its moisture from the sky, and […]
Paintings and drawings by Andrew Alba travel with you. Even his signature leaves an echo in your head: a pale white loop-the-loop signature, alba all lower-case and cursive, no letter superior to another in size or emphasis or speed. Eyes, in his paintings, are blobs-of-darkness, curiously suggesting blindness, […]
Since losing a print in Santa Fe seven years ago (a single print by a Russian artist; it disappeared after being left at the foot of a bench, across from an art museum), I always feel a pang of pleasure/sadness/delight when I see a framed print on any wall. There it is, I think, made it to its destination. Where it should be.
If you go to SaltGrass Printmakers (412 South 700 West), you can find one.
The big sturdy abstracts by the artist Carlisle, placed in as vast an interior space as Kiln, a “co-working office space,” in the Gateway complex, become almost small paintings, though many are five feet tall. Kiln itself looks deceptively small from the outside: it’s many-chambered, many-halled, full of […]
The actress, the model, the bird-girl, the queen, the naturalist — Emily Christensen McPhie’s portraits of women in her Nature as a Goddess show at David Ericson racks them all in, in a way the old-time illustrator Arthur Rackham would like, in the way Cindy Sherman the modern […]
In Alpine Gallery, situated on South Temple Street between a pastry shop and a bridal boutique, Samantha daSilva’s works on canvas have the feel of a trip into and out of the depths of a mine. Exactly what any bakery or bridal shop (or mine) must dread most […]
“It looks like an airplane from here,” one of our visitors from out of town says as we approach the roundabout in our car. (The visitor has actually flown planes.) “It looks like the back of a penguin,” says his wife. “And look, there’s a setting sun on […]
Probably all the important essences of human life in this world can be summed up by the works at 15th Street Gallery: paintings of humans’ cities, paintings of humans, paintings just for the joy of painting and vessels made from clay. Most of Aaron Memmott’s paintings (“State Street […]
In Salt Lake City, one of the most pleasingly brave and authentic events I have the pleasure of attending is 12 Minutes Max, staged by Paul Reynolds and Salt Lake City Public Library (Main Library) every third Sunday at 2 pm in its ground-floor Tessman auditorium. Each month, […]
This book of essays opens with a memory of a song sung by the writer’s grandmother. “A voice that could make people cry,” the writer writes. Her grandmother was asked to sing a popular song as an emotional blessing or benediction at a celebration of the Boulder (Hoover) […]
Nothing’s more full of promise than a prop room in a theater, and that’s what this corner of the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art feels like, filled with Mitsu Salmon’s paintings on raw muslin. All six of Salmon’s big paintings (approximately 4 x 5 feet) are happy explosions […]
Allen Smith’s set for Annie Baker’s play Body Awareness at Pygmalion Theater is a kitchen and a bedroom — as Ikea-perfect as a dollhouse. There is something so orderly about the kitchen it’s startling; it ‘s too precious to be real. It seems it’s still a drawing on […]
Stephen Trimble’s 25th book is called The Mike File. The sound of the word mike trips certain thoughts: a sound-amplifying device; the beginning of the name Michaelangelo; that Mike is a nickname for a boy’s name common around the world. Memories: what-to-name-your-baby books tell new parents the name […]
You felt your car was honorary among elephants, that you were where a Thai dignitary or king or queen would be, or, surely, had been: while an elephant mural was still there, at the restaurant on State street in Salt Lake City called Thai Siam. Once, when it […]
