Artists

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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

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.

Judith Mehr was born May 5, 1951, in San Francisco, California. In 1969, she received an art scholarship to Brigham Young University and graduated with a BFA degree in 1974. By 1978 her career included illustration and portrait commissions from the LDS church and other private and corporate clients in Utah. She began to achieve a reputation for portraiture and genre-scenes and has exhibited oil and watercolor landscapes, still-lifes, and genre scenes in galleries and arts festivals. Commissions for the LDS church include a 74-figure mural of “The Eternal Family through Christ” for the Family History Library, and twelve medieval court-life murals for the restoration of the Hotel Utah, now known as the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. In 1990, Judith also had a landscape painting “Morning in Zion” included in the National Arts for the Parks 100 juried show. Judith continues to be highly active in art creation and exhibition in Utah. Her work can be found in government, corporate, and individual collections across the United States and in Japan.

Daniel Bischoff Baxter was born on 7 July 1948 to Kenneth and Ada B. Baxter in Ogden, Utah. His life in art began at an early age. For many years he and his brother, Ken, spent Wednesday nights and Saturdays painting under the instruction of Frank Ericksen. Following graduation from West High School in 1966, Dan received several scholarships to attend the University of Utah, including a Sterling Scholarship in art, an academic scholarship, and one in gymnastics. He graduated from the University of Utah in 1973 with a B.F.A. As a protégé of Alvin Gittins, Dan taught figure painting and drawing at the University of Utah for two years and also conducted classes privately. He completed his formal education with two scholarships to the National Academy of Art and the Art Students League in New York City, where he studied with Daniel Greene, a portrait artist well known on the East Coast. Dan lived for several years in New York City and San Francisco where he primarily painted landscape, portrait, and city scenes. He died of AIDS in Salt Lake City in 1986 at age thirty-eight. “One has to wonder if Danny were alive and painting these past ten years,” wrote Bevan M. Chipman in 1997, “what heights he might have attained.”