Judith McConkie

I once took a short story course from Thomas Cheney at BYU. I remember his lecturing about ways to draw characters in a story. “If,” he said, “you want to include a Mrs. Ryan and show her to be a cantankerous old woman, you can either say to your reader, ‘Mrs. Ryan was a cantankerous old woman,’ or you can simply put her into the plot and let her cantank.” I think that remark bears upon the cover for the women’s issue. The criteria for such a cover are: 1) It must be eye-catching and attention-getting. (The brilliant red will do that quite nicely.) 2) It must be somehow illustrative of the contents. And 3) It must address the idea that women have come some distance in the ten years since the first women’s issue. An illus￾trative cover would leave no doubt as to the nature of the magazine, but it would fall short of the mark in giving Dialogue readers an indication that “we’ve come a long way, baby I” It is like the first method of informing us about Mrs. Ryan. On the other hand, a cover like mine is sophisticated and highly technical. It is indeed eye-catching if for no other reason than its redness. It is motivated by an intellectual concept rather than a didactic aim and, in sum, it says (by its way of being) that Mormon women have come a long way since the craftsy cover of ten years past. We are more sophisticated and professional and thoughtful. Rather than telling people that fact, we are demonstrating it—the second Mrs. Ryan approach.

KP^xlOW (image size 53 /4×53 /4″), 1980, one-color lithograph on Arches buff. 7 wanted to do a print about Mary Cassatt—her wonderful person and work. An immensely patriotic woman from Philadelphia, she lived nearly all her adult life in France. She was an impressionist who held herself aloof from the bourgeois art community. And her most famous works are paintings and prints of mothers and children (she never married). She was profoundly influenced by Degas—that “dreadful misogynist” and by the Japanese woodblock prints imported after 1866. Like mine, her life was a series of ironic anomalies

18×24″, 1980, graphite pencil on Rives BFK. This quip comes from the Goncourt brothers, art dealers in nineteenth century France who specialized in Japanese woodcuts: The taste for things Japanese! We were the first to have such a taste. It is now spreading to everything and everyone, even to idiots and middle￾class women! Early on in my studies I became one of this group of suspicious intellect by doing a suite of drawings and prints under the influence of Japanese art. My intent was to echo the nineteenth century Kacho-ga or nature woodcuts—exquisite prints that embued the smallest, most common piece of nature with poetic dimensions.

15×22″, 1981, xerox transfer lithograph with emboss￾ment, tusche washes and three-color blend, bleed image on white Arches 88. Kelly is three—with that capacity to manufacture friends for all occasions when real friends are not about. During the last elections an imaginary friend, often bidden to lunch, was called Reagan (a wonderful irony in our Democratic house￾hold). Others—animal or human—come and go, but “Lisa” is ubiquitous. With hair improvised from a towel, she is cosmopolitan. We always know she is with us when Kelly stands just so. “Judi,” she says, stroking her terry-cloth locks. “I’ve come to visit.”

(image size 18×16″), 1981, one-color lithograph with hand- drawn prismacolor over on Rives grey.
I’ve always admired Rembrandt’s self-portraits—they mirror the progression of his
soul while faithfully reflecting his domestic condition. This print started out very
high-key—butterfly oranges and yellows on a white ground. Through the fall of
1980 upon the death of my father and other complications of that winter, it
gradually metamorphosed.