Artists

Marylee Mitcham

Marylee Mitcham was born in in Atlanta, 1967 from Georgia, the University in 1943.  She and Carl, her husband of forty years, currently reside in Golden, Colorado, where he teaches Nature and Human Values at the Colorado School of Mines. They remain in close touch with their four chil￾dren and seven grandchildren. Much of Marylee’s early writing grew out of Catholicism, the church she belonged to until she became a Mormon about sixteen years ago. From 1972 to 1982, she and her family lived as members of a small community of Catholic couples devoted to a life of contemplation and simplicity. Her book An Accidental Monk, about her domestic search for God, was published by St. Anthony Messenger Press in 1976. Her articles, essays, fiction, and reviews have appeared in a variety of publications, including Commonweal and CoEvolution Quarterly (now Whole Earth Review) . She wrote a novel in the 1980s. Twenty years later, following her conversion to Mormonism, she rewrote it, and she calls it a “Mormon post-modernist novel.” So far her manuscript has not found a publisher, owing, she thinks, to the fact that “my style and tastes and spiritual concerns are not mainstream.” When she can, she retreats to the small house she and her husband built on the deserted site of a frontier mining camp in the pinyon and juniper country of southern Colorado, a locale which Marylee finds spiritual￾ly sustaining. This site furnishes the artifacts from which she composes her art – broken glass, stones, pieces of brick, and a variety of other objects. Her search for these artifacts has led to what she calls “wonderful surprises.” She considers her art a spiritual exercise which keeps her in conversation with God and the land.

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Janis Mars Wunderlich

Janis Mars Wunderlich was born in Akron, (1992) Ohio, and an in MFA 1970, from received the Ohio a BFA from Brigham Young University (1992) and an MFA from the Ohio State University (1994). She has given numerous lectures and workshops through￾out North America. Articles by her have appeared in periodicals, including Ceramics Monthly , which also featured her art in the December 1999 issue. She is featured in the book The Best of New Ceramic Art and the upcoming title 500 Figures in Clay . She has exhibited worldwide and her work is found in permanent and private collection.

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Maryann Webster

Maryann Webster was born in San Francisco and grew up in northern California. She received an MFA and a Research Fellowship award from the University of Utah where she now teaches. Recent exhibitions of her work have been in galleries in New York, Chicago, Berkeley, Santa Fe, and Portland. She works with porcelain and glaze-like enamels that withstand extremely hot temperatures. She likes to imagine these durable materials outlasting our civilization.

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Heather McClellan

Heather McClellan is a freelance artist working with a variety of corporations, journals, individuals, and LDS-related publications. Her current work with the world’s largest publicly held social expressions company has fanned her interests in graphic design and children’s illustration. Heather’s “Sites of the Saints” series (included in this issue of Dialogue) was completed in 2002 as part of her thesis requirement at the Cleveland Institute of Art; it includes eight ink drawings of the restored Mormon sites in northeast Ohio. While she is continually experimenting with other media and subject matter, Heather aspires to expand her portfolio in the directions in which she’s now headed – with special emphases on LDS and children’s art. Most of all, she hopes to express her versatility and creativity in her family life as much as in her artwork. She and her husband, Richard, share the joys of a 19-month-old daughter and have a second child on the way. Ms. McClellan can be contacted at <wrinhker@comcast.net>.

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Franz Johansen

Franz Johansen studied art at Brigham Young University under B.F. Larsen, Glen Turner, and Roman Andrus, then at the California School of Arts and Crafts and the Academie de la Grand Chaumière in Paris before joining the faculty at BYU in 1956. There he is currently a professor emeritus. He has done commissioned architectural sculpture for the LDS church, including the facade of the Museum of Church History and Art in Salt Lake City. His work, based on religious symbolism, is expressively realistic. Talented in a number of mediums, he works in several. His sculpture, drawing, and oil painting command the most attention.

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Michal Onyon

Michal Onyon graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting from the University of Utah. Her talents as an illustrator and designer have been applied to positions and commissions for such Utah entities as The Utah Symphony, The Utah Ballet, Red Rock Brewery, The Downtown Alliance, Salt Lake Acting Company, O.C. Tanner Jewelry Store, among others. She lives in Bountiful, Utah with her architect hus￾band Sean Onyon and their two children Hilary and Riley. About ten years ago Ms. Onyon began painting watercolors during spare hours while on trips and family vacations. This collection now in￾cludes a good number of scenes from around the world, of which she says: “When I see these pictures, I can recall the same surrounding sounds, smells, temperature, people, circumstances, light and air as when they were painted. It is a timeless feeling to escape everyday life by trying to capture a world so much bigger and varied than we can imagine.”

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Harry Anderson

Harry Anderson (1906-1996) was born in Chicago to Swedish immigrant parents. He abandoned mathematics to become a very successful artist whose illustrations were popular in national magazines such as Colliers , Good Housekeeping , Ladies Home Journal Redbook Magazine , and The Saturday Evening Post. In 1934 he underwent a religious conversion, became a Chris￾tian, and joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church. He thereafter divided his time and talent between lucrative commercial work and religious sub￾jects, becoming one of the foremost religious illustrators. His works have been reproduced by the millions in books, magazines, and posters. They in￾clude several commissions from the LDS church.

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James Christensen

James Christensen was born in Culver City, California, and studied at the University of California at Los Angeles and at Brigham Young University where he earned an MFA. Since the 1970s, he has been on the faculty at BYU and has developed a national reputation not only for his naturalistic religious painting, but also for poignant and humorous caricatures of life in a world of fairies, hunchbacks, and dwarves. He has worked closely with Greenwich Workshop to produce several highly successful illustrated books.

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Robert Marshall

Robert Marshall was born in Mesquite, Nevada, and once played football for Brigham Young University. He has been on the art faculty at BYU since 1969 and has chaired the department. He is known as an arts administrator, arts patron, and fine artist. Once recognized primarily as a watercolorist, he is now widely acknowledged for his large oils in series and is best known for his oil paintings of intimate views of Utah’s we

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Joel Smith

Joel Smith was born in Draper, Utah, in 1929 and grew up in Provo with summers on the family farm in Logandale, Nevada. He attended BYU High School in Provo then earned a degree in Art Practice from Brigham Young University where he studied with Roman Andrus and Brent Larson. He also studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, and while earning a Master’s degree in Art from the University of Cali￾fornia at Berkeley, he resorted to fruit picking, window display, dish￾washing, cannery and lumber mill work, social welfare, and insurance investigation to finance his education. Since completing his degree, he has taught life drawing, basic drawing, design, watercolor, and painting at seven universities throughout the U.S. and in Canada. He has been in many exhibitions internationally and his artwork is included in noted museum collections, including among others the museum of Modern Art in New York; Tate Gallery, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; and the National Gallery of Canada. Since he left teaching in 1994, he paints morning, noon, aņd night in Colchester, Illinois, near Nauvoo where he has his studio. He takes occasional painting trips to southern Utah.

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