{"id":36152,"date":"2016-11-01T18:32:15","date_gmt":"2016-11-02T00:32:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=36152"},"modified":"2018-09-08T18:37:24","modified_gmt":"2018-09-09T00:37:24","slug":"be-wild-and-original-art-and-life-burn-bright-for-maureen-ohara-ure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/be-wild-and-original-art-and-life-burn-bright-for-maureen-ohara-ure\/","title":{"rendered":"Be Wild and Original: Art and Life Burn Bright for Maureen O’Hara Ure"},"content":{"rendered":"

photos by Simon Blundell<\/p>\n

Maureen O\u2019Hara Ure shares her truth, however whimsical, however wrenching, in mixed media on panel.<\/h4>\n

The incident in \u201cThe Night of the Fire,\u201d which is part of\u00a0Love & Work<\/em>, her fascinating solo show at Phillips Gallery through Nov. 11, actually occurred in 1978, when the timeworn apartment building in which she lived with her small family burned to the ground, with one fatality among the residents. The artist still can\u2019t shake the events of that cold and terrifying January night: fire frequently makes an appearance in her dreams and in her work, often as, in \u201cSmoke, There\u2019s Fire,\u201d an active volcano. And no wonder: she, her husband and 4-year-old daughter escaped with little. After the fire, she says, \u201cI owned clogs and a bathrobe and a necklace and my husband owned an old ratty parka and loafers and slacks and our daughter owned underwear, a blouse and a baby blanket.\u201d<\/h4>\n

She recalls the Red Cross being on scene with beverages and doughnuts and refusing the hot cup of coffee husband Lincoln Ure offered because she would never get back to sleep if she drank it and \u201cI had an early class.\u201d Crazy, she says, how our minds work in a crisis, adding that as life goes on, \u201cmore disasters get sent your way.\u201d<\/h4>\n

The couple\u2019s adventures began in 1968, when Maureen O\u2019Hara ran away from home with Lincoln Ure at the age of 18 (\u201cso I guess, technically, I wasn\u2019t really a runaway\u201d). She clearly remembers her father shouting at them as they backed out of her parents\u2019 Minneapolis driveway in Ure\u2019s Volkswagen. Ure was an Episcopalian \u2014 he became a priest in fact, and was assigned to St. Mark\u2019s Hospital staff for 41 years. O\u2019Hara grew up in Detroit in a large Irish Catholic family \u2014 seven kids in all \u2014 and suffered mightily for sharing a name with the famed red-headed screen actress who starred opposite John Wayne in \u201cThe Quiet Man,\u201d set in Ireland, among other classic films. Her grandmother, unconcerned with young Maureen\u2019s frequent embarrassments, told her the Hollywood actress would be gone long before the teasing had further impact \u2014 O\u2019Hara lived until 2015, O\u2019Hara Ure points out with a rueful smile.<\/h4>\n

She spent 12 years being educated by nuns and living with \u201cbad, cheesy art\u201d: art that was symbolic, potentially dangerous or sacred, but that ultimately, later in life, gave her the opportunity to travel.to the countries where it originated.<\/h4>\n

For decades she has continued to travel in the realm of imagination, too, her works frequently populated by the odd creatures that appear in cathedrals and temples. Some of O\u2019Hara Ure\u2019s more fanciful creatures seem to fit that old Scottish prayer, often (incorrectly) attributed to Robert Burns:<\/h4>\n

\u201cFrom ghoulies and ghosties
\nAnd long-leggedy beasties,
\nAnd things that go bump in the night,
\nGood Lord, deliver us!\u201d<\/h4>\n

All are fascinating, some can be fearful and, at the same time, awfully cute, like in the 16\u201d x 20\u201d work \u201cTsunami.\u201d On the other hand, the long-leggedy ones toting dismembered human limbs in their mouths \u201cEndangered Species\u201d may be off-putting. Still, the creatures are based on odd (to us) pre-Renaissance and medieval interpretations of animals O\u2019Hara Ure discovers\u00a0 and then sketches or paints in watercolors during academic research trips to Europe and elsewhere. These sometimes appear in her limited-edition books, the most recent (and affordable) being\u00a0Seeing and Believing: A Traveler\u2019s Sketchbook,\u00a0<\/em>which focuses on Burgundy in central France (available at Phillips, Ken Sanders and UMOCA).<\/h4>\n

In addition to animals, she is interested in Last Judgment and apocalyptic imagery as well as natural disasters.<\/h4>\n

Her travels have inspired various academic projects, including a 2002 book on Italy; an installation in response to Scotland and Ireland; and a book on India. In 2012 she collaborated with her colleague, former Utah Poet Laureate and U. English Professor Katharine Coles, on an exhibit that focused on Byzantine art, primarily Italy and Turkey. \u00a0Of O\u2019Hara Ure\u2019s work, Coles says: \u201cThe images rivet us because they bring together despair and darkness with exuberance and a literate, profound wit. The new paintings remind me of Hieronymus Bosch in their precise vigor. They show us a kind of hell, but one surprisingly pleasurable to look at.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Now an assistant professor lecturer, O\u2019Hara Ure has been at the U since 1990, when she was given a one-year appointment. \u201cThis is a beautiful situation for making art,\u201d she observes. \u201dBeing in an environment all day, every day, where art is important. I\u2019m in a building and have peers where this is meaningful\u00a0activity. 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\u2019m not in my art. If the art communicates something, fine, but it\u2019s 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\u2019s misunderstood it\u2019s not a miscommunication. The fact that I\u2019m working with metaphor means that I\u2019m not shooting for clear communication. In teaching I have to be absolutely every minute involved in communication and I tell my teaching assistants that you find out very quickly what you don\u2019t know when you have to teach.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Sophomore drawing is about her perfect class, she says. It\u2019s not loaded with \u201call kinds of preciousness.\u201d Students go through some 70 sheets of paper, and they can be handed gesso and get rid of everything they did the week before and start over \u2013 \u201cand I talk to them about giving up, about losing and moving forward.\u201d She also teaches seniors as they are about to graduate and covers about 50 percent creative process and 50 percent \u201cnuts and bolts issues: taxes, contracts, jobs, resumes,\u00a0web sites.\u201d<\/h4>\n

\u201cI talk a lot about time, particularly to seniors, and that all you have is time and how are you going to use that and how are you trivializing that.\u201d She prints up a calendar and asks them to keep track of their time in quarter hours for a week \u2014 not to hand in, but to visualize it. One student said he was spending an awful lot of time cleaning. \u201cI asked him if he was spending his best drawing time washing his socks when he could just throw them in the washer and draw. I mean, probably an architect would have to have a totally clean apartment before he could do a drawing,\u201d she observes. But perhaps not an art student.<\/h4>\n

Like her fellow faculty members she works in a not-quite-large-enough office\/studio; hers with a big window overlooking the football stadium. It\u2019s cluttered with an enormous collection of books, colored pencils, sketchbooks from her trips (she is never without one and urges her students to carry one, too).<\/h4>\n

\u201cI start out with gesso, layers and layers of gesso, and I feel like I start painting then,\u201d she explains.\u00a0 \u201cI work really directly at that point. I might be looking at a corner of a medieval painting or something in my sketchbook and just be messing around and I work a lot of things all at once so if you go into the studio there will be eight things stretched out \u2014 I may touch down on eight or 10 surfaces and most things don\u2019t work and then I put stuff away \u2013 I find it again \u2013 it\u2019s all water-based, and then color pencil and ink and it\u2019s again sprayed. And I do a lot of sanding,\u201d says the artist. \u201cMy process is as reductive as it is additive. So I\u2019m taking off as much I\u2019m putting on. And it\u2019s all real thin,\u201d she adds.<\/h4>\n

Love & Work<\/em>\u00a0features a pleasing variety of work from this artist. There are the creatures and beasts she\u2019s best known for. But the show also has Western landscapes with pale apricot skies that grab your attention from across the room; and there\u2019s a particularly effective stormy seascape featuring crashing waves, marvelous soaring birds and a storybook ship with full-blown sails.<\/h4>\n

Some pieces in the Phillips show celebrate her husband and their strong, vital relationship that was upended this past June when he died swiftly and unexpectedly of a very rare (200 cases since 1870), very aggressive cancer. He started the first hospice in Utah, was reportedly easily met and inventive about how he did his job as hospital chaplain at St. Mark\u2019s. He was clearly a popular man: the opening at Phillips was flooded with doctors \u2014 as well as with U. students and faculty in support of his wife.<\/h4>\n

One work that was resolved for the show long before it opened has eerie significance. \u201cSorrow\u201d features a weeping willow, Early American funerary art seen in embroidery samplers and stonework, which was completed, titled and signed a month before her husband\u2019s diagnosis.<\/h4>\n

She continues to paint out the tragedies in her life and simply go on with it all. Teaching helps; as does walking her beloved dog; and the couple\u2019s daughter Heather, now 42, and their four grandchildren who live nearby in the Pacific Northwest.<\/h4>\n

O\u2019Hara Ure has never before had a car as an adult. She has walked; biked; taken mass transit. Now that it\u2019s available to her, and with the deadline of the show, she uses the family car all the time \u2014 and just got her first faculty parking pass.<\/h4>\n

She listens to British mysteries on books on tape while she works, or even to informational podcasts, having found music too dictatorial in terms of mood. \u201cI\u2019m fairly regular and ritualistic,\u201d she says, and quotes Flaubert: \u201cBe regular and orderly in your life so you may be wild and original in your work.\u201d O\u2019Hara Ure concludes: \u201cI definitely feel like that. It makes a safe space for me.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Love & Work\u00a0<\/em>by Maureen O’Hara Ure is at\u00a0Phillips Gallery<\/a>\u00a0in Salt Lake City through November 11.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

photos by Simon Blundell Maureen O\u2019Hara Ure shares her truth, however whimsical, however wrenching, in mixed media on panel. The incident in \u201cThe Night of the Fire,\u201d which is part of\u00a0Love & Work, her fascinating solo show at Phillips Gallery through Nov. 11, actually occurred in 1978, when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":844,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,14],"tags":[3046,157],"class_list":["post-36152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artist_profiles","category-visual_arts","tag-mauren-ohara-ure","tag-phillips-gallery"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-08 00:33:29","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/844"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36152"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36153,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36152\/revisions\/36153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}