Osral Allred would make you rethink watercolor. Spend any time with his work and you were quickly convinced that watercolor was not simply the realm of broad washes and cheery, bright colors; nor that it was only for painting pretty flowers. For over forty years his dappled surfaces, […]
Occasionally I will return to a familiar subject or location that I happen to like and paint it again. I have actually done this on a number of occasions, and each time I have enjoyed the experience. Why? A good subject is a good subject, and painting on […]
You should have seen the goosebumps last year: the sold-out Libby Gardener Concert Hall caught in one ecstatic sweep of cello and poetry. I’d been merely interested but left labeling it a TOP 5 2013 experience. And it’s happening again this Friday. Coleman Barks, the whisky-voiced bard who […]
Forget Idealism. In the hands of an artist, hard truths can be made immortal. Goya’s “The Third of May, 1808” and Picasso’s “Guernica” continue to speak on behalf of murdered innocents long after convincing the world that it was the pretensions and excuses of their powerful, military butchers that were […]
In an interview with 15 Bytes on the occasion of the its publication, Max Werner explained that his fourth book, Evolved: Chronicles of a Pleistocene Mind, was actually written before the three that preceded it into print: Black River Dreams, a collection of literary essays about fishing, Crooked […]
Back in the September 2013 edition of 15 Bytes we featured a photo essay on the street art — public and private — of South Salt Lake. Because our office is in the city, we continue to get to know the area and discover new gems, including this pair of […]
In 1987 poet Scott Cairns, then a teacher of creative writing at Westminster College, organized the first series of poetry readings at the college. Under Cairns’ directorship, followed by Katharine Coles’, and now under that of Natasha Sajé’s, The Anne Newman Sutton Weeks Poetry Series eventually included such […]
I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Eric Samuelsen, resident playwright for Plan-B Theatre Company. His latest work, Clearing Bombs, will debut on February 20. During our conversation, I was struck by Samuelsen’s success: 20 years as professor in the theatre department at Brigham Young University […]
If asked to name an artist they know something about, most people would probably reply, ‘Vincent.’ They might well defend their nomination by pointing out that he was precisely what comes to mind when someone says ‘artist.’ He was notoriously daft: inspired, driven mad by the very […]
Unlike most traveling exhibitions, the pieces on display as part of do it did not arrive at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA) in large wooden shipping crates to be unpacked and installed. Instead, the do-it-yourself project, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and organized by Independent Curators […]
Christmas is a time for traditions, mostly welcome, but we could do without a recent one: the culture clash that’s come to be known as the ‘Christmas Wars.’ The pattern will be familiar to anyone who has followed the national news, or for that matter ever been bullied, […]
C. Wade Bentley’s poetry chapbook Askew is appropriately titled because so many of its poems accentuate the way reality can be tilted through verse to expose bits of newness in the monotony of everyday life. Bentley’s poems are often narrative in that they tell a story in miniature, a small […]
“My paintings come out of my love/hate relationship with Modernism,” says Utah artist Steven Stradley. “Modernism pigeon-holed itself, I think. [Clement] Greenberg pigeon-holed it as he had all of those ideas about painting as a flat surface, ideas about painting super-imposed upon the work that maybe did not […]
“Money doesn’t talk; it swears” — Bob Dylan Money does a lot of things, and like swearing, they can be good or bad. Consider twenty-first century art, for example. Money attracts talent, and with unprecedented amounts of money flowing into the art market, there is so much wonderful […]
The nineteenth-century Utah artist Alfred Lambourne (1850-1926) loved Great Salt Lake. Nestled within a basin, the body of water he referred to as his “inland sea” was his source of adventure and joy, his faithful companion and as such, his preferred place for solitude. His relationship with […]
Waterscapes by Connie Borup opening January 17th at Salt Lake City’s Phillips Gallery once again demonstrates the power of resurrection. Not just the renewal of nature, but the regenerating endurance of Borup’s idiom. Working in oils on medium-sized canvases, Borup continues to explore nature, and how little we […]
What is the nature of a narrative? It has a beginning, it has a development that involves content, often conflict, ideally growth and progression, and it has an end. The best narratives are the ones that have an end that does not end, that through our experience of […]
Park City has been transformed three times. First with mining. Then with skiing. And over the past two decades it has been transformed, at least one month out of the year, by Hollywood. So, as the glitterati take over this month during the Sundance Film Festival, we’re taking […]