Artists

The work of Bonnie Sucec tells a powerful story about the artist and the fascinating environment that cultivates her images. Her own words reveal her private sensibility and offer insight into her work. “I like to think that my paintings have content and tell stories – even make social comment. I don’t want them to be too light. They’ve got to have a little substance; they are not just color, shape, and whimsy. I like matches – both their shape and their function. Strike a match and set something on fire. I had a match collection when I was a kid, but my mother made me cut all the matches out because they were dangerous. “My animals have such a nice variety of shape and sizes and they don’t have to be real. I like the colors and positions, and I can make them up. Their particular characteristics don’t appeal to me as much as their overall shapes. The animals I’ve been painting lately are confrontations. They are set up in tense situations, looking at each other. I want them doing something.” Like the Chicago Imagists, Sucec has a profound sense of the painter’s craft. She works her surfaces and then reworks them to perfection. Her sense of craftsmanship belies the apparent crudity of her subject matter. She leans toward the expression of introverted states of mind, ruminations in fantasy, highly personal idiosyncratic mythologies, and subversive, even anti-social sentiment. Sucec’s various college experiences have all influenced her narrative style. She says about her study of sculpture: “One thing nice about sculpture was I didn’t have to learn how to weld and chisel and all those traditional things. If it couldn’t be glued or taped I was doomed. I can draw anything I want to, it just takes me a long time. You can get lazy and skip that part and then the abstract work is pretty flat, if you don’t know how to see. There is a lot of abstract work that’s very surface – it’s not very interesting. I really work on my surfaces. All your work says what you know about art, how you use color, what you know about shape; the ideas are all right there.” Above all Sucec loves images. She works in Salt Lake, perhaps because she thrives on the struggle for personal narrative cultivated in a place that forces her to be alone, thus refining and intensifying her inward vision; or perhaps because Salt Lake can be, even to a painter, a fascinating, turbulent, even strangely thrilling place to work in, to collide with. “I have a couple of drawings that are my headache drawings. I have lots of migraine headaches, so I paint lots of animals with head injuries or their heads popping off. It looks more interesting to me. I was in Ecuador three years ago. I felt kin spirits with all that South American magic. It was won￾derful. My parents have a home in Mexico. I guess I’m really influenced by the sense of decoration – I like color and animals and magic. I don’t know much about magic, but it’s great when something wonderful happens that you can’t explain.” (Adapted from “Acting Out,” exhibition notes by Gayle Weyher; in

This issue features the work of Shauna Cook Clinger, a Utah artist. A native of Salt Lake City, Clinger began her artistic training under Harold Petersen ģ As a presidential scholar, she studied under Alvin Gittins and Doug Snow at the University of Utah. In 1979 Alvin Gittins wrote that “Shauna Cook [Clinger] is an unusually gifted artist – a ‘natural.’ ” She graduated magna cum laude from the University of Utah in 1976 and did graduate work under William Whitaker at Brigham Young University in 1978-79. Clinger comments: “For me, all of life is the manifestation of and vehicle for deeper spiritual realities. My passion remains using the human form as an expression of spirit – from a personal interpretation of one specific indi￾vidual to a symbolic metaphor or personification of broader spiritual concepts, beliefs or experiences. My work mirrors and documents my inner journey. Can my process be captured on and communicated from two dimensional surfaces? For me, that is the quest.”

This issue features the work of Andrew Whitlock, a photographer, adjunct professor for the Utah State University Art Department, and current associate curator for the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University. Whitlock says of the photographic essay presented here : “I’m a member of a unique brotherhood bonded by disillusion, despair, chance, exhaustion, shock, aftershock, wounds, and death. That brotherhood, abandoned and branded, came “home” from Vietnam to fight a second war – an inner war. “I both believe and epitomize the image of returned Vietnam veterans whose war continues. Now after almost two decades, I have found a means of facing that wrenching time of instant transformation from boy to man. These are my photographs born of implausible reality, nightmares, flashbacks, and sleepless nights. “Each photograph is an unearthing of some small corner of my past experi￾ences – combined with symbolic items and hand-colorized silver prints to help interpret a time and prolonged event incomprehensible to both the participants and those who avoided and/or, ignored that war. “I use red, violet, and purple, along with yellow, and the colors of the Vietnam Service Medal. “Consciously I am trying, to be aware of some things, but I think that I have a lot of subconscious pulling out, and I am dwelling on the past experiences that I’m not totally aware of, until that work is pretty well in the making. “The changes have not been easy. The years since have been difficult, and I’m still working on resolving the inner war. The photography is helping.”

DeWITT PALMER , a lifelong resident of northern Utah’s Cache Valley, developed a lasting interest in ranching during his youth. After retiring from a career in business, Palmer taught himself to braid rawhide, calling upon boyhood memories, determination, and the help of braiders throughout the West. Palmer’s finely constructed reins, headstalls, hobbles, and bossals are popular locally and outside of Utah. Palmer is affiliated with the national Rawhide Braiders’ Association and received the Utah Governor’s Folk Art Award in 1987.

SHAWN CLARK makes bentwood furniture from willow and other soft woods that grow near his home. His work represents a centuries-old craft tradition. In the last few years, Clark has improvised with this tradition by incorporating antlers, rawhide, and other natural materials into his furniture. He has demonstrated at numerous public festi￾vals and has sold his furniture to people from many parts of the country.

ADA JENSEN learned to make rag rugs at Relief Society during the Depression and since then has crafted more than 550 rugs for family and friends. Using donated rags, she likes to work with durable bright colors and bold patterns. She has demonstrated her rug￾making skills in her church and community, at the Festival of the American West, and at the Jensen Historical Farm in Cache Valley.

HENRIETTE MUNANUI was born in Tahiti, where she learned to make traditional textiles, tifaifai , from her mother. She has lived in Utah since 1969 and has continued her craft, often sending to Tahiti for the right type and color of cotton fabric for her appliqued textiles. Her work was featured in a traveling exhibit of Polynesian quilts, and she has frequently demonstrated her skills.

Sisters MELVA EMRAZIAN and ROSE PETERSON come from a family that endured fifty years of exile in Syria before immigrating in the mid-1960s to rejoin earlier Armenian-Mormon immigrants in Utah. During their exile, the family earned a living by weaving rugs. The girls learned to knit, crochet, make lace using only a needle and thread, and reproduce an item simply by looking at it. Both sisters create textiles, and Rose works as a professional tailor.

HAZEL and WALLACE ZUNDEL were born and raised in the small Shoshone settlement of Washakie, just south of the Utah-Idaho border. Both learned their crafts in their traditional community, which fostered age-old skills like basketmaking, hide tanning, and beadwork. The Zundels have displayed their bead and leather work in numerous galleries, art shows, and fairs and have taught their skills in both schools and festivals.