Next gallery stroll———> March 21st, 6-9pm
Nicole Parish
An autistic artist with an intense love for insects, Nicole is fascinated with the natural world. She paints the information she sees as accurately as possible and to scale. She mounts the insect on a piece of colored paper and places it next to the canvas to reference for the painting.
"Much of my time was spent outdoors playing in the dirt and looking for insects. My mother would read A Girl Of The Limberlost aloud to me as I drew and painted, which introduced me to entomology and raising insects. I then grew up taking care of praying mantises, beetles, butterflies, and moths, along with other creatures like snails and spiders. Saving the insects I found and cared for, I learned how to preserve them once they passed. My collection grew and soon became the subject for my art."
Marty Ricks
Nicole Lavely
My work explores the complexities of loss and grief through visual metaphor and the development of layers to create a history within the panel. I hope my piece can provide an experience that allows the viewers to take pause and hold space for grief that lives in each of us. The grief that we continue to grow up, around and through as it is an inescapable fact of the human experience. To grieve is to have loved, to love is to have experienced the greatest gift of all.
Martin Sanchez
Martin draws inspiration from his emotions, memories, people, and surroundings. He loves using bright colors with a retro feel inspired by the 50s, 60s, and 70s. "Art is a poetic expression of self."
Krysta Mae Dimick
Krysta is an architect with a heart for thoughtful design. Her process is initiated by understanding the client's needs and desires, paired with an experience of space. After thoroughly understanding these two aspects, the design can then be resolved with ideas of context, simplicity, and a connection to the environment. "More than architecture" is an idea that has spanned and connected all aspects of life and has influenced her designing for the good.
Jenna Johansen
Jenny's journey as an artist was ignited by her mesmerizing encounters with Utah's captivating landscapes. In her artistic vision, she perceives each landscape as a living entity with its own soulful melody. Her artistic endeavor revolves around capturing these intricate rhythms and harmonious notes, translating them onto her copper canvases with an intimate connection.
Enthralled by the timeless allure of classic paintings adorning copper canvases, Jenny found herself irresistibly drawn to their innate luminance. This affinity led her to embrace copper as her preferred painting surface, a choice that has become synonymous with her artistic identity. Through the harmonious interplay of vivid pigments and the radiant qualities of copper, Jenny's artworks resonate with a distinct symphony, a melodic resonance that truly flourishes when experienced first hand.
Heather Richardson
Heather Richardson is a contemporary oil painter whose work captures the beauty in life's quiet, everyday moments. By looking beyond the obvious, she transforms ordinary experiences into visual stories that resonate with expression and innovation.
Heather holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting and drawing from the University of Utah. She has explored various media, but her passion lies in oil painting. This medium allows her to fully express the light, texture, and emotion that define her work.
Elizabeth Walsh
Elizabeth Walsh is a visionary artist who reimagines Contemporary Western Art with a profound exploration of color and intricate detail. Her artwork is a captivating reflection of nature's vast and mesmerizing possibilities. Drawing on recognizable imagery and employing a mosaic-like impressionistic style, Elizabeth breathes new life into some of the world's most iconic locations. Her powerful pieces command attention and evoke a deep connection to place.
Rachel Ensign Nelson
Rachel paints a gratitude-fueled celebration of the natural world's beauty and bounty, a fascination with light and its various properties, and an insatiable urge to create and explore.
Painting flowers and blooms, she loves studying—and attempting to depict—light reflected, light refracted, ambient light, direct light, cast shadows, form shadows, occlusion shadow, and everything in between. It is a beautiful and profound truth to me that an object can take on the color of adjacent objects thanks to the properties of reflected light. That is likely true for us as humans as well: we take on the light and the shadows of those we surround ourselves with, and true too that there is beauty to be found in both light and shadow.
Halee Roth
I seek beauty in the land and in my art. The figures I paint express the grace of the human form entwined with the grace of natural forms. Many years spent wandering gardens, mountains, and deserts, ever looking closer, have influenced the organic lines and shapes used in my flowing compositions. There is a balance of beauty and decay in nature. The light that glows in human flesh and makes things grow is also in the dark earth, moving through the dead and dying, regenerating into life again. The colors I choose, while rich and bold in the light, are balanced by dark expressive forms of shadow and decay. The flesh tones I am drawn to represent a kind of inner glow and are not local skin colors, but color combinations created using thin transparent layers of color opposites. When blended optically, they create a third glowing color that cannot be achieved through mixing opaque colors. This light, glowing through layers of paint and layers of earth, is worth pursuing and I can find endless references to it in the human form and natural world.
Denise gasser
Denise’s paintings attempt to lift the veil on the appearance of things and reveal a kind of magical order within. Though subject matter varies, her work consistently embodies tension between organic and geometric, order and chaos, reality and dreams. Her work has exhibited in the US and Canada and is owned/commissioned by private collectors around the world.
Reconciling art and motherhood is an important theme in her practice and social presence. She founded the Art After project, a series of small paintings that occur in one sitting and must be ‘finished’ once she is interrupted. This project has had a large global reach on social media and acted as a catalyst to facilitate a larger conversation about the challenges and rewards of making art after motherhood. Art After has shown in galleries and the individual pieces are found in private collections on several continents. Denise has also extended her passion and creative experience through artist talks and workshops in the US and Canada.
Denise has lived and worked in the Bay Area, Vancouver, BC, and now resides near the mountains of Utah with her husband and four sons.
Maureen Merrell
I am a Utah Based artist and mother to four. I am inspired by contemporary realism, and feel drawn to themes of spirituality, humanity, and cityscapes. My hope is to bring beauty and meaning into the world through my artwork.
When I was a child, I dreamed of being an artist. That dream faded for many years as I pursued a career in healthcare, and in 2011 I received a BS in Nursing from Brigham Young University. Years later, in the throws of motherhood, I felt myself aching for a creative outlet. What began as dabbling with watercolor in 2017, has bloomed into an unexpected and fulfilling art journey.
Since 2020 I have studied at the JKR Studio Academy and continue to be inspired by many wonderful local artists. I have had the privilege to participate in various art shows, including the Spring Salon at the Springville Museum of art, JKR Gallery, and Writ & Vision.
Michelle Champagne
My name is Michelle Champagne, and I am a self-taught landscape artist based in North Logan, Utah. My artistic journey began in 2023, and I draw much of my inspiration from the tonalism and luminism movements. Primarily working in oils, I also occasionally explore other mediums such as soft pastels and watercolor.
As a passionate artist, I find myself constantly drawn to the beauty of nature and the ever-changing landscapes that surround us. My main focus is capturing the breathtaking colors and serenity of sunsets through my paintings. The process of blending and layering the paint to create a harmonious and dream-like quality is something I find truly fulfilling. My goal is to transport viewers to a peaceful place through my art, allowing them to escape and get lost in the beauty of the natural world.
Mike Erikson
Art has always been an extension of who I am. I love creating, surrounding myself, and learning about all aspects of it. I am always looking for new and innovative ways to express my passion.
A significant value I have that I incorporate into all my artwork is recycle/reuse. Whether reusing canvases and salvaging leftover paint for my paintings or using discarded materials to create my sculptures, I love breathing new life into what would have ended up at a landfill.
I enjoy the process of sculpting in reverse. I start with a pile of miscellaneous parts and materials and then design the sculpture from what I have, versus designing a sculpture and then acquiring the supplies to make it. Although I do both, I like the challenge of transforming "junk" or leftover materials into upcycled art.
Alison H Spencer
"I have my dad to thank for my love of birds, wildlife, and all things beautiful. Since I was a child, he has taken our family on many adventures worldwide to hunt for birds with our binoculars. We'd often explore wetlands around our home in Utah to watch the shorebirds, pelicans, eagles and osprey, cranes, terns, meadowlarks, ducks, herons, and owls on still winter nights. The birds we have in Utah are equal in magnificence to birds anywhere in the world.
Recently, passionate discussions have been held about the future of our lakes and their surrounding marshes. While land development and growth are essential to our state’s growth, we remain responsible for ensuring this growth is done wisely to minimize our impact on native plants, insects, birds, and other sensitive wildlife.
With these portraits, I hope to introduce you to a small handful of the hundreds of remarkable, beautiful species of birds that depend on Utah's lakes and the “messy,” marshy lands surrounding them. As we discuss the future of our home, let us remember what we stand to lose—permanently—with each decision.”
