I entered Phillips Gallery last week with a little shiver of anticipation: there’s a solo show by Maureen O’Hara Ure, one of the most original and interesting artists working in Utah today. And I was going to get to talk to her about it. Art, for O’Hara Ure, […]
There is a perplexing mix of styles in the landscape show at Phillips through March 11th: stark collages by Liberty Blake and scenic works by Joe Carter don’t blend particularly well on the walls of the Main Gallery and disprove the usual idea that opposites can be attractively […]
Edward Bateman’s latest work makes manifest the adage that one can create mountains out of molehills — molehills made from little bits of plastic and representing real-life Utah mountains. The artist provides small models of his molehills cum mountains (or is it the reverse?) at Phillips Gallery, where a fine […]
Hadley Rampton, who paints en plein air accompanied by her dog, Phoebe, primarily in the Rocky Mountain wilderness she loves but also (sans dog) in town squares and picturesque alleyways around the world, learned a couple new lessons about (and from) Utah’s scenic backcountry during the Pandemic: that […]
Downy Doxey-Marshall introduces the baker’s dozen large oil paintings in Immerse, her current show in the Phillips’ Dibble Gallery, with a twice-relevant quotation from Pablo Picasso: The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls. The key here is “washing,” a word that […]
In “Charity,” a clichéd old man — straw hat, glasses, cane, bag of bird seed — stands in shallow water at the beach, feeding a large gull that hovers in midair to take seed from his open hand, both seemingly oblivious to the wave: a wall of water […]
Utah artists like what they do. If any of them feels tortured, they’ve kept it to themselves. Some see their art as a prayer, others feel like telling a story. Some see art as a challenge to take on. A popular gallery like Phillips can pull together three […]
The ladies and gentlemen at Phillips had a grand time bringing Spring to the main gallery for the current show – it hits you right in the solar plexus as you walk in and leaves you, well, hopeful. They do it with color, of course: screaming tangerine walls […]
“I don’t do strange stuff with Photoshop,” states Paul Dougan, who seems more interested in chatting up the printing process than discussing other aspects of his work. “If the color red is there, it’s the best the camera can do and I can do to keep it red.” […]
A feeling of almost baronial formality falls over you as you approach paintings by Heather Barron, a feeling you should straighten your clothes as you approach framed mirrors. Petits fours, anyone? In America, petits fours are received as a gift in a long, very shallow box: they’re a […]
These paintings should not be as good as they are: with their muted palette, square format and generally flat lighting, they should be boring. But are not. Patricia Kimball has never been a flashy painter, one who indulges in bright colors and virtuoso effects in her figure paintings […]
In her profile of Joseph Ostraff for the Artists of Utah publication Utah’s 15: The State’s Most Influential Artists, Laura Durham focuses on the artist’s tendency to seek engagement from others in his work — from the artists and individuals who have influenced him, to the scores of […]
What Edward Bateman does is as much in the realm of science as art — as reminiscent of Leonardo and Edison as of Michelangelo. Which is to say that unless you can grasp what he’s about on his computer, it becomes difficult to explain the results of his […]
During lunch at Kyoto, painter Oonju Chun asks, “Why do we say, ‘If I were . . .’ instead of ‘If I was . . .?”’ — one of those nitpicky English questions a writer hates to answer with “Ummmm . . .“ * But does. So, it […]
If you want to put Denis Phillips in a box, make sure it’s a big box — to quote singer/songwriter Dan Bern — “with lots of windows, and a door to walk through.” Call that box, if you will, “one of Utah’s most talented abstract painters,” as Bob […]
