For February we’re asking Utah artists about a specific piece of art or artist living or dead, local or global, that has sparked their curiosity or influenced their work. We’ll be running some of their responses throughout the month.

Traci O’Very Covey, “Blue Torso with Birds,” 16″ x 20″ gouache

Artist Traci O’Very Covey was born in Salt Lake City and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Utah where she studied drawing, painting and graphic design. She is known for her lyrical paintings of intertwining elements from nature and overlapping symbolic – often allegorical, figures. The various elements in her art interact and mingle harmoniously with a strong interplay between color, shape and line creating dynamic and unified compositions that offer a sense of discovery.

“Nature continues to stir my creative spirit,” she says. “There is so much art that I love, from ancient illuminated manuscripts, Persian miniatures and textiles with their stylized plants and animals, to Boticelli’s allegorical masterpieces, Chagall’s paintings with their dreaminess and whimsical quality, and Gauguin’s paintings of Tahitian women, and contemporary art too numerous to mention. But if I had to choose one artist whose work continues to move me, it has to be Henri Matisse. His jubilant use of color, his creative use of simplified shape and form, and his uplifting subject matter never cease to inspire.”

Henri Matisse, “La Musique,” 1939, Kunsthaus Zurich

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.