Cedar City artist and professor Brian Hoover on the spot.

1) What are you reading lately?
Nothing too heady. I am currently re-reading one of my favorite books, “Little Big,” by John Crowley. For me, it’s a magical book full of strange, wonderful, often disturbing and inspiring imagery. It’s a read for those with an escapist mentality like myself. The book is also delightfully written. It’s full of many very loooong descriptive sentences that read like poetry and require a re-reading just for the fun of it.

2) What hangs above your mantel?
Because my walls serve as temporary storage for my own work …as things are constantly coming and going… work is always being moved from one room to another. Currently, however, I have a Wayne Kimball lithograph and one of Susan Harris’ lidded funerary tripods (with armadillos) as centerpieces in the living room.

3) What artist, living or dead, would you choose to paint, sculpt or photograph your portrait?
That’s a tough one. My first impulse would be to choose one of my 19^th– century Symbolist heroes or a contemporary artist like Julie Heffernan, just for the sheer surprise of what they would come up with. But for more self-serving reasons I’d have to choose Adolph-William Bouguereau. In my opinion, there is no one else before or after him that can seamlessly transform paint into living flesh so well. I would choose him just to watch him paint. 

On the Spot

This is our chance to check in with members of Utah’s art community to see what they’ve been reading, seeing, doing.