Artists

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.”

Rob Adamson was born in Bountiful, Utah. He received his BFA with emphasis in painting and drawing from the University of Utah in 1992. Some professors who influenced him there were Paul Davis and Dave Dornan. The work of Charles Hawthorn, Emile Gruppe, and LeConte Stewart have also influ￾enced him. Roh teaches at Salt Lake Community College. He paints in his stu￾dio located near his home in Millcreek, where he lives with his wife, Sharyl, and three-year-old son, Zachary. Lately Rob has been painting cityscapes. “Early in the spring of 1996, I was having a difficult time finding the right location to paint. After driving up and down the canyons near Salt Lake City, I gave up and began driving home. As I drove down 3300 South, I passed a McDonald’s restaurant and thought to myself, ‘Now there is something I haven’t painted before.’ I quickly set up my easel across the street and began to paint. Something magical began to happen. I was painting the unpaintable. This ordinary scene soon turned into an extraordi￾nary one. I found myself looking at the angles and shapes of the building, and the way the afternoon light would highlight certain areas of color while hiding others in the shadows. I became more interested in the composition of the scene rather than the subject matter. I painted everything I saw – telephone poles, street lights, stop signs. I used objects like telephone poles and street lights to break up space into an interesting composition. I also used color, value, and tex￾ture to make the composition interesting. “After my painting session that day, I realized I would not be returning to my normal routine of landscape painting. The next day I waited for the late afternoon light and painted a 7-1 1 convenience store. “I realized how much the city was a part of my life. Some artists live and paint in the country with beautiful green and ochre fields, cows in the fore￾ground, and blue-green mountains in the distance. I live in the city with fields of asphalt and cement, cars in the foreground, and gas stations and fast food restau￾rants in the background. There are signs of various shapes and colors every￾where. Telephone wires connect one building to another in tandem. “Nighttime in the city is especially magical with the artificial lights bounc￾ing off glass, metal, and wet pavement. The colors are bright and vibrant.”

John Hughes became interested in art at an earlier age, although his serious study of landscape painting began after military service and college. His education has consisted of informal study groups, high school and college classes, and national workshops with some of America’s foremost painters. He has been influenced by excursions into the field with other artists, many of whom he has formed lifetime friendships with. But his primary inspiration is nature itself. He believes in working from life, doing small field studies, and bringing them back into the studio as references for larger paintings. He often backpacks into the mountains with his pochade box in the true spirit of plein air painting. John’s works hang in collections throughout the United States. He exhibits regularly at the Springville, Utah, Salon and has shown his work at the Arts for the Parks Top 100 Show (1995,1996) in Jackson, Wyoming. He recently won first place in the oil division of the Best and the Brightest show at the Scotsdale, Arizona, Artists School. Others of his galleries include Williams Fine Art in the Z.C.M.I. Center Mall, Kings Cottage Gallery (both in Salt Lake City), and Meyers Gallery in Park City, Utah. One week each summer he teaches plein air painting in the Salt Lake City area through the Kings Cottage Gallery.

In July 1997 Jacqui Biggs Larsen will exhibit at the Art Access Gallery in Salt Lake City in a show titled “These Stories That We Carry.” Her work speaks like stories, featuring the familiar in unusual new ways. Her work is mixed media and includes collage, oil paint, pastels, charcoal, and many found objects such as torn-up maps, safety pins, miniature furni￾ture, and even a set of piano keys. She says, “These found objects and images are crucial to my work. I see them as artifacts that connect the work to the here-and-now, and provide an entrance to each respective piece.” Her subject matter is also the familiar, in her own words, “I find myself exploring childhood, sisterhood, maternity – in ways that question Western traditions of idealism. By replacing idealized images of femaleness with photocopied photographs of everyday women, I hope to piece together new myths and narratives.” Jacqui Larsen has exhibited in New York, Ohio, Arizona, Illinois, and Texas as well as throughout Utah. She has an MFA from Brigham Young University.

In June 1911 Gisbert Bossard, a disaffected convert to the LDS church from Prussia, gained access to the interior of the Salt Lake temple and took a series of unauthorized photographs. Together with local entrepreneur Max Florence, Bossard first tried to sell his pictures to church president Joseph F. Smith, who not only refused to bargain with “traffickers in stolen goods,” but printed some of them in the Deserei Evening News. Bossard and Florence then tried to stage in New York City a theatrical exposé of the Mormons and their temple. Their sensa￾tional slide presentation failed to attract much interest. In response to Bossard’s and Florence’s activities, the church commis￾sioned James E. Talmage to write The House of the Lord and Ralph Savage to take professional quality photographs of the temple’s interior to accompany Talmage’s discussion of “temples ancient and modern.” The story of Bossard’s escapades, and the publication for the first time in more than eighty years of a broad sampling of his photographs, is fea￾tured in this issue of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.

Born and raised in Salt Lake City, Susan Gallacher developed an early interest in art, entering Vern Bullough’s landscape painting class in seventh grade. Encouraged by Vern to pursue oil painting, she has made a lifelong study and occupation of painting in both oil and watercolor. As an art student at the University of Utah, Susan’s skills expanded under professors Paul H. Davis and Ed Maryon. In the 1970s she began her career as an art teacher with positions in the Granite and Sandy school districts as well as private instruction. In 1984 she established King’s Cottage Gallery and Art School where she continues to direct and teach. Other prominent Utah artists also teach at King’s Cottage. Susan has had many one-woman art exhibits and been accepted in more than seventy-five juried shows, receiving numerous awards. She has also served as an art juror for several exhibits. Many of her paintings are in private collections throughout the United States and England. Currently she is represented by Southam Gallery and King’s Cottage. Susan’s painting philosophy is deeply influenced by the “plein air” attitude that artists should paint any subject, whether a landscape, still life, or figure, directly rather than from photographs. She observes, “When I paint, the weather, the light, the fragrance in the air, my mood, all add to the spirit of the day and the essence of the painting experience. These elements become part of the painting itself and one can only have that fullness when painting from life.” Recently Susan turned her attention to painting the camps of homeless people living along the Jordan River south of the LDS Jordan temple. Her paintings depict the ironic juxtaposition of the monumental, shining temple looming above groups of ramshackle huts and tents occupied by transients who prefer this environment to the unfriendly hardness of inner city. Just as eloquently, Susan’s new paintings of Sanpete County capture the character of the Mormon pioneer rural landscape.

Sculpture is a recent art form for Warren Archer, who began sculpting in 1990. Graphic design, film art direction, and illustra’ tion have been his primary occupation since the mid-1970s (he has designed Dialogue for the past thirteen years). He attended BYU on an art scholarship with Trevor Southey as his mentor and advisor. He has studied sculpture under Edward Fraughton, Bruno Lucchesi, Lincoln Fox, and Richard MacDonald. Awards for his sculpture include a number of Best of Show and First Place honors. His studio and foundry are located in the old LDS meetinghouse in Marysvale, Utah. Of his work, the sculptor says, “I love the human form and its ability to touch our hearts with subtle as well as grand gesture. I attempt to capture human emotions in bronze – from moments of inner reflection to explosive expressions of joy.” Striving to capture poetic movement and visual grace, Archer sculpts figurative bronze to communicate the rich culture and physical diversity of humankind. As a spiritually sensitive person, he desires that his work communicate the divine as well as the physical nature of humanity. “I want the people who experience my work to feel the joy of being human as well as being children of a loving God,” he explains.

Eric Thompson is twenty-four years old and has been painting seriously since 1989. Self-taught, he acknowledges the influence of the surrealists, particularly Dali and Rene Magritte. Locally, he experiences the influence of Trevor Southey. His subject matter frequently emerges from his dreams and emphasizes mood and feeling over meaning. For Eric, painting is a source of great satisfaction and challenge.