Gallery Profile: Salt Lake City
Horne Fine Art
by Mark Dicosola

The new gallery and studio of Karen Horne offers Utah artists a concrete vision of an integrated artistic life. Karen Horne has managed to combine her life as painter with the need for studio and gallery space. Skylights in the studio offer natural light and after coming back to Utah from New York City, the studio’s space is abundant and now offers room for figurative still-life exploration.

In the gallery, which opened this past month, Horne plans to represent herself and her mother’s work initially. In the future, Horne wants to offer the community a series of themed group shows, and represent a handful of artists’ work.



The premier showing at Horne Fine Art features Karen Horne, paintings and pastels, and landscape paintings by Phyllis F. Horne. The gallery offers viewers a retrospective glimpse of their artistic lives. Both painters are included in “the 100 Most Honored Artists of Utah” at the Springville Museum of Art.

Most impressive in the current exhibition is Karen Horne’s crowd scenes in “Soldier Hollow I,” where people in mass are represented as abstract marks, drawing hatches of pastel, waiting in line at a 2002 Olympic Event. Every mark is expressive and intended on the medium gray-grounded paper. All the light comes from the sun’s reflection on white pastel snow. The shadows are the color of the cool gray paper and the central figure is highlighted in a pink sweater within the gray shadows of the onlookers.


This example of Horne’s color block expressionism show her passion for color theory and its affects on the viewing eye. Horne’s paintings represent stills of public life; the Utah Arts Festival, Brumby’s café, east coastal crowds and children at beaches. The viewer pays close attention to how Karen uses shadow to define the composition of the painting. These cool shadows define her focus on color theory and how the eye visually mixes colors and abstracts space putting Joseph Albert’s color theory studies into practice.

Phyllis Horne’s attention to abstract detail in “Evening Snow” includes light reflecting on snowflakes. Phyllis’s paintings inspire the viewer to place themselves in her forest, garden, season, and time. Her paintings have nostalgia behind them and carry excellent visual narrative. Her subtle highlights and intense color make the canvases glow. The gallery itself is warm and inviting and offers Salt Lake City a great space to experience art. Don’t miss this one every month for gallery stroll even though its off the beaten path.

Horne Fine Art is located at 142 East 800 South, or hornefineart.com , or call 533-4200 for gallery hours and appointments.



Exhibition Preview: St. George
Tales of Magic and Fancy
by Jodi Adair

The St. George Art Museum is pleased to present The Art of Imagination: Tales of Magic and Fancy, an exhibit of fantasy art inspired by traditional children's fairytales, nursery rhymes, and other "childish" fancies.

Select works by renowned fantasy artists James C. Christensen, Greg and Tim Hildebrandt, "Dinotopia's" James Gurney, and Scott Gustafson will be featured, as well as the "fantastic" flying airships of Alpine, Utah sculptor Dennis Smith.

Many in the community may be familiar with James C. Christensen’s works, which are often associated with the many images he has provided for the Shakespearean Festival in Cedar City, Utah. He has illustrated numerous projects for Time Life Books including Time Life Dragons. Several paintings from this series will be on display



"My aim," says Christensen, "always begins with a desire to connect with imagination." He adds, "My work is an invitation to let your imagination run wild, explore, and make interpretations spontaneously." Many of Christensen's interpretations of traditional fairy tales and favorite nursery rhymes will be included in this magical exhibition.

Visitors to The Art of Imagination: Tales of Magic and Fancy will also be pleased to find many of Greg and Tim Hildebrandt's imaginative works included. Throughout their careers, the Hildebrandts worked together and separately, winning awards and fame. They created everything from their own first novel, Urshurak, to their world-famous Star Wars poster. Together they have won the coveted Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators. The St. George Art Museum will be showing a number of paintings from J.R.R. Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings which they worked on together, as well as an assortment of Greg Hildebrandt’s originals inspired from Alice in Wonderland, Pinnochio, Wizard of Oz, Robin Hood, and other Children’s tales.

Other favorites included in this "fantastic" exhibition are the brilliant, detailed paintings by James Gurney from his popular fantasy book, Dinotopia, as well as a variety of works by Scott Gustafson who has colorfully depicted his version of the Wizard of Oz, The Three Little Pigs, and Little Bo Peep, to name a few.

A lively three-dimensional aspect to the exhibit includes the marvelous flying airship assemblages by Dennis Smith, popular Alpine, Utah sculptor.

Of these works, Smith says, "Have you ever wondered what it would be like to fly? Almost everybody has..." That is what prompted the artist to make a sculpture entitled "Viking Airship" which is on display in the Museum exhibit. It is not of a bird, but of a flying machine "so light that it carries six kids higher and higher into their wildest imaginings." Smith has made dozens of these "airship" sculptures over the years, each one a little different, with different colored wings, and different shapes of tails and varying numbers of children being transported on their "fantastic" journey. His works are found in public displays in fifteen states, the Ukraine, Moscow, London and Prague. Smith is most widely known for his sculptures of children, but is also sought after for his abstract assemblages and fanciful flying machines.

As a special component to the fantasy exhibit, the St. George Art Museum is inviting the children in the community to submit, on an 8 x 11 sheet of paper, their own "fantastic drawing" of their favorite fairy tale character or story which will be kept in a binder for all Museum visitors to review and enjoy throughout the show. Children may sign and date their works of art and turn them in at the front desk of the Art Museum or mail them to:
St. George Art Museum, Attn: Fantasy Exhibit
47 East 200 North
St. George, UT 84770

An opening reception will be held 6-9 p.m. on Friday, March 28th at the St. George Art Museum, located 47 East 200 North, St. George, Utah. Admission is free to this event and all, both the young and the young at heart, are invited to an enchanting evening of art, music, and light refreshment.

Of his interest in art, Card explains, "By the age of ten, the idea of ‘Being an Artist’ had solidified in my head. I had always drawn. It seemed to satisfy that need which sprang from somewhere deep inside. I drew landscapes, arches, trees, rocks, old sheds, air planes, horses, and the faces of beautiful women and girls. The ‘Artist’ idea seemed intact after all my infatuations with rockets, science, biology, botany, geology and astronomy. Being an artist was where I was headed. I took extra classes in art during high school and summer school. I would ride my bike to Brigham Young University’s newly completed fine arts building and get kicked out of graduate studios trying to watch them paint."

Getting his driver’s license, for Card, meant weekend camping trips to the desert. The early ‘70s found Card at BYU. He received his B.F.A. in painting in 1976. Followed by, in 1979, his completion of his M.F.A. in both painting and sculpture, as well as a minor in design printmaking.
In 1980, Card began teaching printmaking (woodcut, etching and silkscreen) for BYU and continued through 1986. During this time, he occasionally taught an art history, printmaking or drawing class for Utah Valley State College and the University of Utah. He also participated with the Utah Arts Council in their Artist in Education Residencies Program.

Card explains, "My love of printmaking, especially woodcut and its linear quality, seems to inform and influence my painting. I did woodcuts almost exclusively for ten years before coming back to serious painting in 1989".

Card’s recent paintings are now on display at the St. George Museum of Art exhibition “Redrock, Badlands, and Sage.” Of the twenty paintings in this exhibition, Royden Card explains, "These new paintings are a continuation of my journey. The long horizontal format is a rather new approach. I have sketched in this format for years, but just recently began painting in this format. I love the ridges, the shadows, the forms, the colors, the skies. Our eyes see the broad expanse. I have been focusing on part of it, the ridges out toward the horizon, the place I am not able to be at the time and the distance I wish to explore. So, I bring it in close and crop the portion I want to see, the part I want others to see- to make the distance accessible without foreground. Maybe it’s like flying or seeing what usually gets overlooked, because we tend to be so focused on the foreground or what is so close to us. Maybe it is because I tend to gaze off into the distance, longing for what I cannot attain; the wish for the time to explore more deeply, thoroughly, what is ‘over there’, far away, mysterious."


"And then there are the roads and the signs. They seem interesting to me. The sign that warns of the curves, the speed. I always want to drive slowly through the landscape. I would rather walk it. So, many times I pull off the road where I can and walk back to look at the views that get overlooked. Because we are worried for our safety, heeding the warning signs as we pass through, we don’t see the beauty that is ‘There’. And it is ‘There’. It is not always at the destination, the state park, the arch, the ‘view point’ at the end of the trail. I guess it is why I also love those barren badlands between small desert towns that most people are so much in a hurry to get through to somewhere else (where the map and the guide book say is something worthy of looking at or taking a photo of). Sometimes I just like the color of the sign or the foil of the strip of road or its color as it sits in the landscape. Sometimes I eliminate all signs of human intervention. It depends on what it is I want to really see at the time".

"The desert has always been my escape, my solace, the ‘place I go’. I hike, sketch, shoot photos and occasionally paint on location (usually just ‘starts’ that I finish in the studio. I am not a ‘plein air painter’, just a ‘plein air sketcher’). I draw to remember, to try and make the beauty stay. I draw to understand the landscape. I paint in an attempt to hold time, place, and emotion in some sort of stasis; to say what I cannot say with words. I paint to communicate this incredible ‘thing’, this piece of truth I have found, experienced. I paint to make inert matter sing the way my heart did when standing in the presence of nature".

"Over the course of my artistic career, I have created still-life, paintings of old adobe and stone churches, but I have always explored landscapes. Desert landscape is ‘primal raw’. It seems to be the dust from which I came".

St. George Art Museum admission is free. Museum hours are: Mon. 6 p.m.- 8 p.m.; Tu- Thurs. 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; Fri. 11 a.m.- 8 p.m.; Sat. 11 a.m.- 6 p.m.; closed Sunday and holidays. For further information, please contact curator at museum@infowest.com.


Exhibition Review: Salt Lake City
Art in the City: Exhibition Nuggets
by Mark Dicosola


Art Space- Bridge Project
At the corner of 500 West 200 South

Marilynn Read- surrealistic, primitive watercolors of animals; giraffe, horses, fish reminiscent of Cézanne and Rousseau. Dreamlike and fresh. John Jackson- abstracts reminiscent of cubism technique- hard and edgy compositions where line defines lyrical shapes and colors.

Phillips Gallery
444 East 200 South

Tom Howard - Inspired Celestial Landscapes that show the big cloudy western sky and desert scapes. The quiet solitude of his paintings is a symphony for reflection. The artist ponders the brilliant colors of reality and captures the twilight glow. Most impressive are two smaller paintings of clouds reflecting sunlight.

Cal Vestal- Found object kinetic sculpture on 2nd floor patio. These metal sculptures are irresistible to movement whether by wind or hand.

Salt Lake City Library
Incredible collection of prints by Modern Artists: photographs of Salvador Dali, prints by Max Ernst, Calder, and Cezzane. How lucky we are to get to see this show downtown. Inspirational.

Art Access Gallery
339 Pierpont Avenue
Randall Lake- Realistic figurative paintings emphasizing male relationships are provocative portraits of the artist’s intimate vision of often-private scenes. The paintings give the viewer a voyeuristic feeling with a sympathetic eye.