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.
As you approach the sunlit clerestory of Salt Lake City’s A Gallery, the first of Toni Doilney’s paintings you see, “Old Town,” prepares you for the dare and ski-run of all these paintings — a rising and falling series of moving terrestrial lines, suggesting terracing, the magic of […]
There’s a lot for the heart and mind and mental taste buds in the Art Access II Gallery, where the color palettes used by painters are almost merry-go-round rich. Most unforgettable is Tess Cook’s oil-on-panel “Smooshed,” where a tropical blue turtle industriously works its way across the goo […]
What are prints? In a way, they’re coinage: capable of being drawn, or pulled, as printmakers say, from a belabored crucially important original art surface, in potentially endless number. Unlike coins, a print has a stated and limited run. And a good printmaker does an almost horrific thing […]
It’s as if a mad chef split an enormous cooking gallery into all round bowls and pans and rolling pins on one side; on the other, angular cutting boards, trays, rectangle and square pans. “Brights, sweets, for you,” he cries to Susan Jarvis the painter. “Darkness, depth,” he […]
“Use of color” is an expression over-abundantly used, often because someone doesn’t know what to say about art, or artists: as an artist, you are congratulated on “your use of color” when, of course, you usually have no choice. Color’s there, it happens; you might have chosen the […]
David Ericson Fine Art is a gallery’s gallery: old, jumbled, cozy. In this 1883 building, two chairs have been carefully set across from each other in front of the small fireplace, with its old ornamental insert, the solid, dull brass looking like an ancient shield against winter. There’s […]
Simmering with spring are the sumptuous studies of empty pink- sateen ballgowns painted by Lindsay Frei at 15th Street Gallery. In “Formal Facade” and “Surplus Satin,” our eyes dip and swoop into hanging, empty bodices, imagining the feel of the satin, drinking in its color like palest of […]
In Matt Flint’s paintings, creatures —owls, wolves, bears, horses, swans — emerge from the gloaming, the twilight thicket. Gloam, meaning the making or growing of twilight or dark, now called “an archaic Scottish verb,” was drawn from Old English glom, for “twilight,” and glowar, which meant “glow.” […]
The conundrum: dirt is bad; dirt is sometimes beautifully dramatic. Dirt and dust make sunset beautiful, many-veiled: that’s the magic particulate richness of dust. We’re alive due to excess, things leftover: cast-off matter forms planets; stars are globbed accumulations of recycled matter. We are of dust/dirt, as […]
What if you loved England or Japan, and you could no longer live there, it isn’t/wasn’t possible: you are marooned in America, land of tea dumped into a Boston harbor by men dressed like Indian braves. You might paint multiple crash-courses of teacups, sunlight spilling over them, […]
Linnie Brown’s approximately two dozen pieces in her show Retrace at A Gallery, with titles like “Often Requires Additional Building,” “Need Only to Reattach,” and “The Line Between Now and Then,” make you think of nothing more than — what if all these paintings, with their flanges and […]
There is a neat taking-off trick here: two of Jennifer Rasmusson’s back-in-time representational paintings are here, separated from her New Abstracts now filling A Gallery’s white-on-white indoor sky-lit courtyard area. The pre-abstract “Collection of Blues” is eye-level; it’s very large; one bloom is the size of your head. […]
Ann Poore grew up an army brat — her late father, she jokes, would have emphasized the latter part — who spent her formative years in northern California in the late ‘60s. She came to Salt Lake City to finish college, which she did at the age of20, […]
. Once plants — were art? Most knew them, at least something about their medicinal powers, their lore. Unlucky Ophelia had her declarative listless list of flowers, her mad list, herb and flower names (“…rosemary, that’s for remembrance…Pansies, that’s for thoughts”) symbolizing pre-suicide remembrance and rue—though why-hadn’t-Hamlet-loved-her-enough was the meaning […]
1910. Matisse. All hail the death of “still lifes,” paintings which incorporated over-ornamentalized baked clay pottery, flowers sheared and arranged in water at their height of bloom, damask and linen made from once-living plants, mandolins and violins set out with all their elaborate fittings and gold filigree—once trees; […]
Taking place on a set with almost 20 clocks, Jenifer Nii’s “The Weird Play” has the calculus, the mind-numbingness of geometry. The set, by Halee Rasmussen, contains the gaping hollows of one actual door-opening and one window-opening, opening into the darkness of the Plan-B Theatre backstage, itself clearly […]
