When they hear the word “desert,” most people think of oceans of sand, dunes like waves following each other into the distance. In Utah, we know better: most of the world’s deserts, including ours, have little or no sand to see. Instead, they are made of rock. Bedrock […]
“I want to make the art that ends up in the history books. “With that remark, a local artist — who had gone to the Coast to polish some skills, only to return when it turned out that impressing the Big Pond is harder than it had looked […]
Our relationship with the land is an ancient one, one as old as civilization. One device we have invented to navigate this connection is landscape painting, a genre dating back several millennia. As we approach a situation in which the delicate balance between ecologies becomes increasingly untenable, we […]
We lose something in technical drawing. Kids draw fearlessly, without worrying about whether it is “good”; but as we get older, we lose that sense of confidence and ability, and we either grapple with the pencil, forcing it into precision, or we put it down. At Bountiful Davis […]
What does it mean to die well? With honor? With purpose? Bountiful Davis Art Center (BDAC) explores these questions with a new exhibit curated by Chauncey Secrist: Ars Moriendi. This latin term, literally “the art of dying,” refers to upheavals in Europe after the Black Death, and the […]
[dropcap]When [/dropcap]the towers—there were more than two—of the World Trade Center fell on 9/11, emergency medical personnel anticipated an avalanche of critical injuries. While the survivors on that day were never counted, responders knew from experience what to expect: eight years before, when a bomb exploded beneath one […]
[dropcap]A [/dropcap]sometimes helpful way to conceptualize Modern Art is “old wine in new bottles.” James Joyce, the essential modernist, took a 2,500-year-old epic poem, the “Odyssey,” and repackaged it as a novel—a literary form only a couple of centuries old—that he called “Ulysses,” after the poem’s protagonist, even […]
“Blind Faith” (detail) by Vincent Mattina [dropcap]There[/dropcap] isn’t any rule against making art from a personal, as opposed to universal, point of view. Indeed, it could be argued that most good art started out with something private in it that energized the man or woman who made it. […]
[dropcap]In[/dropcap] biology, circumstances—what scientists call “niches”—summon particular organisms into being. So it may have been inevitable that BYU and Snow College, two of the principal breeding grounds of Utah art, would each possess a teacher who is also a prolific artist, a keen student of local culture, a […]
“Head in Snow,” mixed media on wood, 36” x 48” 2018 When Clement Greenberg wrote his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” in 1939, he declared art as standing opposite kitsch, as a remedy to the dumbing down of taste in a consumer culture. In the decades since, however, many […]
“Arcanum,” Adam Watkins, 2015. Adam Watkins’ photography is strangely hypnotic. Using ornate settings, theater-like props, and bright colors, his images are given a life of their own, creating scenes he describes as “paradoxes of hyper-reality and the empathic tissue of the photographic narrative.” Watkins even admits to sometimes […]
Like microplastics, Justin Watson seems to be everywhere these days. There was “The Fountain of Youth,” his video installation at Bountiful/Davis Art Center, that came down recently, and currently you can see his piece |human| at Nox Contemporary and the exhibition . . . the future is the past is the future is […]
Summer is rapidly waning, but artists are still out there feverishly painting “en” the fresh, plein air. The Brigham City Museum of Art and History’s recent Utah Plein Air Competition gave artists of all ages 10 days to select sites statewide, create artworks and submit them in the […]
