Artists

Lee Udall Bennion and her husband, Joseph Bennion, both descend from a long line of pioneers. They live in Spring City, a Utah village, where Lee paints and Joe makes pottery, which he fires in a wood-burning kiln. They call their dual artistic endeavor Horseshoe Mountain Pottery {http://HorseshoeMountainPottery.com/}. They have three daughters, who share their passion for gardening, riding horses, hiking in the nearby mountains, and rafting on wild rivers. Lee’s paintings have appeared in many group and individual exhibi￾tions and have achieved a number of awards. Over a hundred images dat￾ing from 1983 to 2008 are available for viewing on their joint website. All her paintings are in frames that Lee has hand-carved and painted. Her subjects are domestic, local, and familial. She predominantly chooses to portray people. However, she insists that “portraiture is not my main con￾cern. My painting deals with form, color, and feelings foremost.” There are also landscapes and still life paintings which, she says, “tell more how I feel about a place or a set of objects than what they actually look like.” In￾variably, her subjects appear in simple, sparse settings. Often they merge into symbols. For example, a painting of 1993, Divine Meditation, shows a woman (likely Lee herself) whose head and elongated neck are suffused by an aura of light. The painting on the back cover of the present issue of Dia￾logue portrays a child—perhaps Lee’s grandchild—with wings and a spotted dog. In such paintings, the ordinary and commonplace mingle with the transcendent and divine. Although her Mormonism is rarely explicit in her paintings, her faith underlies all of them. “I hope my love for God’s creation and my fellow human beings shows through,” she said in a recent interview. “Everything I do reflects my religion.”

Sharon Alderman has been weaving cloth by hand since 1969, specializ￾ing in apparel fabrics, upholstery, and color studies. Her work has won many awards, and she lectures, gives keynote addresses, acts as a juror, and leads workshops for guilds, art centers, colleges, and state, regional, and na￾tional conferences. Her writing and work have appeared in Shuttle, Spindle & Dyepot, Interweave, Textile Artists’ Newsletter, and Handwoven, and her books include Handwoven, Tailormade, A Handweaver’s Notebook, and Mas￾tering Weave Structures, all published by Interweave Press, Inc. She lives in Salt Lake City where her fabrics are on exhibit at Phillips Gallery. More in￾formation is available at http://www.sharonalderman.com/.

Jacob Fossum has little sense of belonging to a specific place, having lived in a number of states while growing up. He currently lives in Sacramento. He derives from a long line of Mormon pioneer stock, and he served an LDS mission in Argentina. He says his Mormon heritage and his experi￾ence as a missionary infuse his art, providing “a profound pool of myth and symbols from which I can dip, then compare and relate to others around me.” When he showed an interest in painting upon completing high school, his mother—a baker—traded bread for private art lessons from a local portrait painter, Martha Lower, to whom he acknowledges a great debt. He holds a bachelor of fine arts degree from Utah State University and a master of fine arts in studio painting from Hoffberger School of Painting, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore. He has partici￾pated in group shows and recently a solo show, “Ganesha Gone Wild” and other paintings in the Rodger LaPelle Galleries in Philadelphia. “I find honesty,” he writes, “in trying to create images that reflect the spiritual and physical truths of my surroundings. . . . Attempting to render images as I see and feel them is akin to my attempts at sensing truth.” For more about his life and art, visit his website at www.jacobfossum.com.

Anne Muñoz resides in Salt Lake City with her husband. Trained in art and textile design, she worked as a free lance graphic artist for many years but continued to produce her own artwork, taking part in art festivals, juried shows, and exhibits. Her creative interest has centered on batik art, which involves the application of wax to textiles in order to achieve layered shades of color.

The American-born Allan West has become widely respected for his pur￾suit of a traditional form in Japan. Raised in Washington, D.C., Allan served in the Okayama Japan mission during the early 1980s. In 1987, he returned permanently to Japan to pursue his art because he found that the Japanese attitude toward nature accorded more closely with his own sentiments. He and his wife and their three children live in Tokyo, where they are active members of an LDS ward. Allan graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts in 1992 with an MFA degree

Born in Park City, Utah, Hal Douglas Himes earned a B.A. and MFA from Brigham Young University where he trained in painting, drawing, and printmaking. Acknowledging Paul Klee and Rufino Tamayo as strong influ￾ences, he also credits his BYU mentors Wulf Barsch, Alex Bigney, and Alex Darais as important teachers.

Born in upstate New York, Dianne Dibb Forbis received a B.A. in Art from BYU. Currently residing in Orem, Utah, she has three daughters and twelve grandchildren. For twenty years she had full and part-time employ￾ment in the printing and greeting card industries involving advertisement ideation, product design and presentation, marketing, writing, and edit￾ing. For many years, she did formal art works on a personal basis only, ex￾ploring possibilities in tempera, pen-and-ink drawings, and collage. She was once employed as an elementary school art teacher and gave private art lessons to children. She also taught English in the California public school system and as an adjunct faculty member for a junior college, engaging in freelance writing and publishing poems and articles in regional and na￾tional periodicals. In 2000 her narrative poetry book about Alzheimer’s was published. After her husband’s death from early-onset Alzheimer’s and during her own continuing struggle with illness, Dianne returned to a determined professional involvement in art. Collage, her current medium and approach, is a metaphor, she feels, for her life task in recent years of having to pick up all the pieces and make something new and meaningful. Her work has been in shows throughout Utah. She has been commissioned by private individuals to do collages based on scripture.

Nola de Jong Sullivan was raised in Provo, where, after sojourns elsewhere, she presently resides. Her art interests began in grade school with painter Flora Fisher and received further development in the art classes of B. F. Larson at the BYU summer campus at Aspen Grove. In junior high school she was encouraged by Virla Birrell and, during her college years, by Roman Andrus. She studied at the California School of Arts and Crafts and the New York School of Visual Arts. In addition, she benefited from an immersion in the arts of the United States and Europe in the company of her parents, Gerrit de Jong and Rosabelle Winegar de Jong and others as well. With her husband, Clyde E. Sullivan, she visited and painted in China, many European countries, the Caribbean, and Mexico. Watercolor expresses Nola’s personality, and she is a joyful teacher of children and adults. For many years she has used art therapy with hand￾icapped people in New York, California, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. She has participated in many juried shows and one-person shows. Her painting Wet Boats is in the permanent collection of the National Mu￾seum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., the first all-woman’s art museum in the world. Some of her award-winning paintings are presently in the Utah Valley Art Guild exhibit. Among the art societies of which she has been a member are the Utah Watercolor Society, Utah County Art Board Pageant of the Arts, and the Art Section of the Provo Women’s Council. She has served as a docent at the Springville Museum of Art and the BYU Museum of Art.

Jon Moe, originally from Orem, Utah, lives and works in New York City, where he has a studio and works full time in photography specializing in fashion. He also shoots fine art and travel. His fashion photography cli￾ents include Givenchy, Zoran, Cynthia Rowley, Danskin, and Jockey. His photographs have appeared in magazines such as Glamour, Zink , and GQ and in a number of books, including The Fashion Book , Fashion Today , a 150-year survey of fashion, and an illustrated survey of modern fashion. For more information, visit www.jonmoe.com

Kah Leong Poon, a native of Singapore, initially attended Brigham Young University as a competitive swimmer but earned a BFA degree in photography in 1995. In New York, he completed internships with Joyce Tenneson and Annie Leibovitz. He was hired by Tenneson, with whom he worked for three and a half years. He now heads his own studio in New York City with clients including London Fog, Ernst and Young, Polaroid, Fujifilm, Psychology Today , Zoom, Zink , and the New York Times . Kah Leong has received awards from Graphis and Polaroid. His work was selected for a one-man exhibition at Grey Worldwide Advertising Agency. For more information, visit www.kahpoon.com.