Maureen O’Hara Ure, “Mother Earth…” mixed media on panel, 16 x 20 in.

The wind was howling, but people were talking about the art, not the weather, at Maureen O’Hara Ure’s packed opening on Friday evening at Phillips, her longtime gallery, where she’s presenting the second set of mixed-media panels she began with on-site sketches while traveling through Spain in 2022 and 2023. The sizeable crowd (which grew steadily as the night evolved) seemed absorbed in viewing, discussing, and, yes, purchasing pieces of the intriguing artwork, much of it heavily influenced by medieval imagery, that will hang in the upstairs gallery through April 12.

It’s a richly detailed and delightful show; the work feels somewhat more refined than in past presentations but is still unmistakably by Maureen O’Hara Ure, arguably the most original artist working in Utah today. In typical fashion, she has created imaginative little worlds that a viewer can mentally enter into and then visually interact with the often-primitive and usually wee creatures that reside in her paintings and are based on odd (to most of us) pre-Renaissance and medieval interpretations of animals the artist discovers in cathedrals and temples and then sketches or paints in watercolors during academic research trips to Europe and elsewhere.

O’Hara Ure describes her method in her artist’s statement as a gradual process of adding layers of paint, ink, and pencil on a durable panel to withstand numerous revisions over months or even years. She meticulously applies thin layers, sanding between each. “My process is as reductive as it is additive. So, I’m taking off as much I’m putting on. And it’s all real thin,” she says. If a piece returns from an exhibition, she might set it aside, but often returns to modify it, sometimes redoing it entirely to erase its previous state. This writer watched as longtime collectors of the artist’s work discovered sanded-over areas in her art for the first time, having been alerted to her process by press reviews. O’Hara Ure typically works on multiple projects simultaneously, handling as many as eight to 10 pieces.

Maureen O’Hara Ure, “Hide-and-go-seek,” mixed media on panel, 16 x 20 in.

Maureen O’Hara Ure, “Poetry,” mixed media on panel, 24 x 36 in.

Walking through the show is a haunting experience, in large part because the artist is dealing with so many personal ghosts with this artwork. For example, two pieces (“Poetry” and the marvelous, magical “Bedtime Story”) feature bright red ladders suspended in mid-air that seem to reference a 1978 fire, when the timeworn apartment building in which she lived with her small family burned to the ground. O’Hara Ure can’t shake the events of that terrifying January night: fire frequently makes an appearance in her dreams and in her work often, as in the mixed media “View from the Shore,” (after a 19th-century watercolor) and “Mother Earth Puts On a Show” appearing as an active volcano. And no wonder this long-ago event haunts her: she, her husband and 4-year-old daughter escaped with nothing but the clothes they were wearing.

Some pieces in the Phillips show may celebrate her late husband, Lincoln Ure, an Episcopal priest who was the hospital chaplain at St. Mark’s for more than 40 years and helped start the first hospice in Utah. Their vital relationship was upended in June 2016 when he died swiftly and unexpectedly of a very rare (200 cases since 1870) and very aggressive cancer. The artist frequently uses a bear to represent herself in her work and the amusingly titled “Pas De Deux” features a pair of them – with only two paws visible.

Now a professor lecturer, O’Hara Ure has been at the U since 1990, when she was given a one-year appointment. “This is a beautiful situation for making art,” she observes. ”Being in an environment all day, every day, where art is important. I’m in a building and have peers where this is meaningful activity. Teaching, particularly for an introvert, is a really good balance in terms of being very monastic, which I am, and being alone and then having to come out and perform and have care and concern about other people and concern directly about communicating, which I’m not in my art. If the art communicates something, fine, but it’s me talking to the painting. The paintings are serving my own needs to take something here and work with the materials and get it out there, but if it’s misunderstood it’s not a miscommunication. The fact that I’m working with metaphor means that I’m not shooting for clear communication.”

The artist recently started to adapt fragments from her sketchbooks and from this series of paintings to fill the pages of her fourth artist’s book published under her imprint, The Hand in Glove Press.

Maureen O’Hara Ure, “Flying Lessons,” mixed media on panel, 17 1/2 x 31 1/2 in.

Maureen O’Hara Ure, Phillips Gallery, Salt Lake City, through Apr. 12

Ann Poore

A graduate of the University of Utah, Ann Poore is a freelance writer and editor who spent most of her career at The Salt Lake Tribune. She was the 2018 recipient of the Salt Lake City Mayor’s Artist Award in the Literary Arts.