Artists

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.

“I prefer artists who stir my energies,” explains Earl Jones, “by showing me what a careful and honest examination of people and nature can yield who can operate among the commonplace and rejoice in the wonder of down-to-earth things, like flesh and rocks.” Born, raised, and educated in Utah, except for a year at the Art Students League, Jones began teaching at the University of Utah in 1962 and left in 1970 amid controversy over his anti-war involvement. He describes himself as being “two generations off the farm,” and many of his paintings portray what he calls “the edges,” those border places his Mormon ancestors settled where the cultivated or inhabited landscape of humans meets the places where they are not found. He has exhibited widely in galleries and museums throughout the western states, is a member of the Plein-Air Painters of America , and is currently preparing for a one-man exhibition at the University of Utah Museum of Fine Arts in January 1995 and an accompanying catalogue. He paints primarily on location or in his Salt Lake City studio, an old service station which he has converted into a studio and school.

A native of Salt Lake City, J. George Midgley (1882-1979) was an amateur photographer for more than six decades. He learned the gum bichromate technique, his preferred method, by observation, reading, and experimentation. Because Midgley was less interested in the sub￾ject matter than in the expression the bromoil process could add to it, he avoided professional beauty spots and concentrated instead on the farms that dominated rural Utah in the early part of this century. He began sending works to exhibitions about 1914 and by the 1920s was exhibiting widely in this country and abroad. His mature work became steadily more abstract as he sought sub￾jects with pattern as the principal focus. Many of his abstract works are based on details of abandoned rural structures. Midgley was an artist who found his own way. As a photographer he was largely self-taught, and his choices of subject, treatment, and method were highly personal. He left a body of work that shows a remarkable vision, confidence in his ability, and solid craftsmanship, all factors that account for his acceptance by major salons and presti￾gious institutions. His legacy is a series of images of an earlier Utah embodied in the unusual form he mastered.

Theodore Milton Wassmer was born 23 February 1910 in Salt Lake City, the eldest of eight children. He was educated in Utah and worked at engrav￾ing and wholesale hardware companies from 1923 to 1942. He began to paint in 1927, his interest sparked when he watched Frank Zimbeaux paint a picture of the old Salt Lake Theatre. During the Depression, though he supported his family of ten for two years, he still managed to sell enough of his paintings for five dollars apiece to finance a trip to the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair. There he felt challenged by the old masters to pursue art. He studied five years with Professor Florence E. Ware at the University of Utah, posing and helping paint in the back￾grounds of the Kingsbury Hall murals. v Pearl Harbor interrupted his career. At Sheppard Field, Texas, he found ways to continue his art, painting large murals for the Air Force during his ofLduty hours. A freak accident in 1944 paralyzed his painting arm. Year￾long therapy at Bushnell Hospital in Brigham City helped him regain partial use of the arm; while there, he painted a mural with his left arm. In 1945 he married Utah artist Judy Lund in New York City, where he studied for four years at the Art Student’s League and for two years with Raphael Soyer. He painted portraits for two years in a Carnegie Hall Studio and moved to Woodstock, New York in 1952, where he lived and worked for thirty-three years. He returned to Utah in 1985. Over two thousand of his works may be found in museums, universities, schools, and private collections. In 1990 the Springville Museum of Art celebrated his eightieth year with a sixty-year retrospective, 1930-1990. Wassmer says about his work, “My art can be no better than I myself as a person and no deeper than my understanding of life.”