Artists

Paul Lloyd Ellingson was born in 1938 in Menomonie, Wisconsin. This Salt Lake City master of watercolor had been one of the most interesting people thinking and working in Utah. He died in 2005.

Ellingson graduated in 1965 from the University of Utah with a B.F.A., in architecture and music, and an M.F.A., in painting in 1970. Ellingson was also an architectural theorist whose concept of the “continumorph” is fascinating and perhaps a landmark in the evolution of environmental-design thinking.

Paul Ellingson as artist maintained his position as an admirable painter of watercolors that are refreshingly economic as a set of low-key suggestion of the landscape, and as an effective teacher of the same, sometimes at the Salt Lake Art Center and sometimes at the University of Utah.

James Taylor Harwood was an American painter, engraver and art teacher. He was the first artist from Utah to exhibit at the Paris Salon, in 1892

Harrison Thomas Groutage was born in 1925 in Richmond, Utah. He is an arts administrator and painter known for his realist and tonalist paintings of Cache County, Utah. He lives in Logan, Utah. Groutage attended Utah State Agricultural College where Everett Thorpe and Calvin Fletcher were major influences. He also attended Weber State College and earned his BA from Brigham Young University in 1953 and MFA from the University of Utah in 1954. He joined the faculty at Utah State University in 1955 and became chairperson of the art department in 1965. Groutage has received awards from the National Watercolor Society, Snowbird Institute, and the Springville Museum of Art. In 1999, he was presented with the Governor’s Award in the Arts by the state of Utah. Groutage’s paintings, Along the Bear River (1978), Back Road (1977), Integration (1959), and San Francisco, Waterfront(1965), are part of the Springville Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

Gary Collins, contemporary oil and watercolor painter and one of Utah’s finest landscape artists, was born in the mid 30’s and has drawn and painted since early childhood. He grew up in a nurturing family that fostered his artistic talent and his innate appreciation of art. At a young age he studied the art of the early Utah painters and practiced duplicating works of the masters such as Van Gough and Matisse. His early interest in art, sparked by teachers and his grandfather, a poet and naturalist, eventually led Gary to sample a variety of related professions while painting; interior and graphic design, architecture and illustration. Selling his first works at the age of 20, Gary ultimately realized his dream to paint full time in 1969. A press release from a Los Angeles gallery said of Gary Collins, “Many artists have the ability to depict a landscape. Few have the talent to show a viewer what the places feels like.”