Artists

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.

In 1948, Bill Laursen grew up in Salt Lake City and Brigham City, Utah. He graduated from Utah State University in 1972 with a BFA degree in art and art education. While at Utah State, he studied with Harrison Groutage and Everett Thorpe. He served as an art teacher at Cottonwood High School in Salt Lake City from 1972 to 2005. During most of that pe￾riod, he served as chairman of the art department and a set designer and painter. In the classroom, he taught drawing, painting, calligraphy, design, and art history. During the summers, for many years he conducted student fine art tours to New York City. He has been the recipient of many awards as a teacher, including in 1996 a “Golden Apple Award” presented by Utah Governor Michael Leavitt and an Outstanding Service to Education Award from the Utah State Board of Education. Recognition of his painting includes Best of Show, Brigham City Museum Gallery, 1972; Park City Arts Festival Award of Merit, 1974; and Oneta J. Thorne Memorial Art Award- Outstanding Watercolor, 1993, 1994, and 1995

Throughout a long life, Robert Perine continually sought new ways to express his vision and use his creative gifts. Born in Los Angeles in 1922, he identified himself as a practicing artist from the age of six. Following military service during World War II, he graduated from the Chouinard Art Institute. He taught at the University of Alabama during 1950-51, then returned to southern California for a freelance career as a graphic designer. His most notable client was Fender Musi￾cal Instruments, for whom he created the legendary “You won’t part with yours ei￾ther” advertising campaign. Although he attempted to maintain his focus on painting, his business, church, and family responsibilities dominated his attention for nearly two decades. In 1969 he made a career change that allowed him to paint more seriously. Innovating with the medium he loved- watercolor- he departed dramatically and very successfully from its traditional use. During the 1970s and early 1980s, his work appeared in dozens of exhibitions and garnered numerous accolades. Among the institutions that own his work are the Butler Institute of American Art, the University of Massachusetts, Brigham Young University, Neiman Marcus, and the San Diego Museum of Art. Eager to expand his creative reach, Perine expanded from painting to writ￾ing and arts activism, starting with writing and publishing the history of the origi￾nal Chouinard Art Institute in 1985. Over the years, he wrote ten novels, several collections of short stories, three volumes of poetry, seven plays, and three musi￾cals (for which he also composed the music). His last major art piece was an im￾mense work called The Tribes ofXyr, which includes 372 graphite head drawings of imaginary beings grouped into fifteen tribes. For each tribe he created a symbol, an alphabet, and a tribal history. Perine also wrote “Descent into Xyr: The World of Waterling Dilper,” a novella that details his encounters with this mythical world, located in an intricate series of caves in the high desert somewhere in the southwest. In 2003, Perine was the driving force behind the opening of a new Chouinard Art School, where he was the director and taught watercolor, design, and figure drawing. Seeing Chouinard arise from the ashes was the culmination of a decades-long dream for Perine, who treasured the combination of creativity and art fundamentals the original school had provided. Perine was raised as a non-affiliated Christian. His first wife was Mormon, and he joined the Church shortly after they married in 1947. They had three daughters: Jorli, Lisa, and Terri. He became active in the Laguna Beach Califor￾nia Ward during the late fifties and sixties, ultimately serving as bishop. In the af￾termath of his career change in 1969, he and his wife divorced, and he left the Church. However, he continued to consider himself a Mormon- one who was not connected to a ward and did not go to Church but who valued its teachings. While he had many differences with the church, he also loved it deeply. In 1979, Perine married Blaze Newman, an artist and teacher like himself, who nurtured his expanding creativity. He died in November 2004, of a sudden heart attack. He taught until the day before his death.