Mary Sauer is a painter from my home state of Kentucky who went on to receive a BFA from BYU and further study with William Whitaker, at the Art Students League of New York, and at the Grand Central Academy of Art. She has been featured on the cover of American Art Collector Magazine, in Southwest Art Magazine, and in International Artist Magazine. Sauer and her husband David, an operatic tenor, are currently enjoying a one-month-old baby. Amazingly, Sauer is legally blind, but she adds, “Luckily they have perfected contacts and glasses to where they don’t need to be an inch thick anymore—the glasses I had as a kid were huge.”

Talk about your creative process from idea to finished piece. My ideas begin by jotting down ideas.  I am more visually motivated than conceptually motivated by work. For example, if I see a painting that is executed with beautiful brush strokes and paint quality, that tends to be what reaches out and grabs my attention first thing. Seeing something that visually inspires me really gets the creative process going and makes me excited to get into the studio.  This has often happened when I look at a painting my John Singer Sargent or Abbott Thayer. I am different than a lot of artists because many times I will make a piece based first on what visually am I excited about putting on the canvas and secondly what the idea conveys.  I was told in Grad School that many people work this way, but that you should keep it a secret so that the conceptual meaning doesn’t feel surface level or shallow. I think the more time I spend painting, the more meaning that I can assign to a piece as I go.  Often times, I’m not even fully aware of an image’s potential to convey a message until after it’s finished. That being said, I am aware of jotting down emotions or body language and color palettes before I begin the process and why a model might be in a certain environment.

You paint almost exclusively women and some children. To me, the experience of painting a women is closer to my experience of life. I tend to paint people who have personalities or struggles that I understand or who are experiencing similar life events.  It’s a way for me to tell my story through others.  In fact I’ve been told that my portraits of women don’t feel sometimes like those particular women, even though there likeness is exact.  I’ve been told that the portraits feel more like me. I am sharing my experience, but they are telling the story.  I am also really interested in color palettes that typically feel more feminine and in painting softer forms.  Children have the best faces for painting soft forms.

You talk about the ‘pressure for perfection’. How does this relate to artists in an age of social media? I think we are constantly looking at social media and what other people are doing with their lives.  It’s easy to take an amalgamation of what a group of people are doing individually and compare that to what you are experiencing in life. When everyone shares the best parts of their lives, it’s likely that your own life will feel like it doesn’t seem to measure up. My piece Expectations (top of post) examines the shedding of the pressures that we place upon ourselves to be what we think others expect us to be. For me it specifically had to do with the decision of when to have children and how many children to have which I struggled with for many years until I eventually found freedom in accepting that it was okay to let go of others expectations and instead create my own for myself. The looseness of how the paint was handled and the allowance of imperfections in the painting like the dripping of medium help to show an abandonment of control.

What are you working on next? I will always be interested in women and children in environments be they interiors or outdoor spaces.  I think the next thing will be based on my own inner struggles, whatever that may entail.  I am hoping to be able to continue loosening up and pushing the painterly aspect of the work as well.

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Zachary Proctor is a talented painter with a skill for capturing scenes of adventure, wonder, and adrenaline. Proctor says of his art, “My intent as a painter is to arrest motion on canvas by artificial means, to capture life and hold it fixed.” He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah and holds a BFA from the University of Utah and an MFA from Utah State University.

Describe yourself as an artist. I often ask myself why I spend so much of my time in a studio painting. Many things come to mind, but mostly I think I make paintings because it allows me to meditate on something for long intervals of time. I can choose to focus my attention on something and then study it out while making paintings about it. The process allows my mind to wander as I explore the different meanings I see in my little world. I think I paint, because painting teaches me so many things about my surroundings, similar to the reflecting pool in a fairy tale.

I enjoy painting at night and finding solitude so that I can focus. Without this I find it hard to get in to the proper frame of mind. I am an oil painter looking for different ways to apply paint to a surface. Recently I have been exploring ways to layer paint by shooting air through loaded house paintbrushes. I am a figure painter because I like the challenge of capturing people in complicated settings. It also allows me to explore narratives or themes.

So many of your paintings are in motion. Why do you like to ‘capture life and hold it fixed’? Painting can be such a static medium. I am trying to find ways to imply movement. After visiting the Prado a few years ago, I was shocked at how soft and blurry Diego Velazquez’s paintings are. It inspired me to soften out the subject and take it a step further by showing movement. I am interested in painting people who are trying to better their situation and to do that involves motion. I take a lot of inspiration from Maynard Dixon’s painting, Forgotten Man. I want to paint people similar to that, those who may have fallen through the cracks, but are out there trying to find a way to better their circumstances. Hard working people who are not afraid of rolling their sleeves up and getting their hands dirty.

What do you draw from to create these scenes? A painter cannot shut off his brain, he/she is looking at everything as a possible subject. I am inspired mostly by film, hence the term “motion pictures.” Wes Anderson, the Coen brothers, Kubrick, Terrence Malick and Alfred Hitchcock are a few of the directors I am stealing from at the moment. I grew up as we all did watching movies and getting lost in their stories. Nothing much has changed as I get lost making paintings in a studio as I reflect on those films. I sort of see a painting as a scene in a movie and an “art show” as a movie full of “scenes.” When you reflect on the life of a painter you see the many movies or “shows” they had and one can see the compilation of their life’s work.

I am also finding a lot of imagery from the books I am reading. I have recently read four of John Steinbeck’s novels and those have opened me up to a wealth of new ideas and images. I have dozens of sketchbooks full of ideas that I work with to collage things together. And I am collecting interesting images I find everywhere from photo albums at my grandmother’s house to things I see on the Internet.

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Jenna von Benedikt is an English painter with an impressive collection of abstracts and a series on birds. Her “passion for art is inseparably connected to faith and family, and explores the physical, spiritual, and metaphorical landscapes we find ourselves in.” She studied at BYU and the Santa Reparata International School of Art in Florence, Italy. von Benedikt, her husband, and her four children now live in Utah. She and her father support recently promoted Watford.

You grew up in England. I moved to the States as a teenager. People have asked me if that was hard, but I loved the adventure, so no. You could count on one–possibly two–hands the entire number of youth in my LDS ward in England and I attended an all-girls, uniformed school in my village north of London. My family, including our horse, uprooted and transplanted ourselves to Provo, Utah. I was blown away by the massive trucks–you know, anything bigger than a F-150 pickup, because economically-sized cars were the family norm and public transport so available in England.

Homes and architecture are completely different in England, and I have always missed that. I traded emerald green grass for sage brush and spectacular mountains. Needing a place to keep our horse, I soon became acquainted with several cowboys that have taught me to appreciate the American Western culture that is prevalent here. High School was fun and students seemed very patriotic… It was unreal to me that you could actually do seminary during your school time. I used to go once a week, and home study the material. The dating and dances combo was strange to me, and asking people to go out with you in these hilarious, sometimes embarrassing ways was a little awkward, but hey, just being a teenager can be awkward.

What was your experience like at the Santa Reparata International School of Art in Florence, Italy? My experience there was during a semester abroad, where faculty from BYU and from SRIA interacted. We took part in print making, painting, and drawing classes in an incredibly beautiful facility and collaborate in a group show. The most significant part to me was the environment of the school and and its stones-throw distance to many historical sites within Florence and the art we were able to see there. The architecture throughout the city is breathtaking. I spent a lot of time on the streets drawing and experimenting with watercolors. Sometimes it can be easy to focus on producing a specific piece of art and forget to enjoy the creative space around you, and the location facilitated an awareness of the cultural environment. It is a place designed to accentuate every part of the creative process–indoors or outside, even if simply sketching & drumming up ideas in the flowering courtyard, listening to the fountain, and soaking up history.

Explain your bird series. A long time ago I looked up the definition of Jenna. It means ‘little bird.’ Other meanings have referenced ‘heaven’. So I started drawing and painting birds as self portraits, and as characters I read about in the Bible. My painting ‘The 11 tweeting the whereabouts of the 12th’ reflected the apostles and the betrayal of Judas and the things they must have ‘tweeted’ to each other when they found out. This series has definitely sparked an internal study of myself. I liked the idea that birds can go places most humans cannot, or at least look down on a place/situation with a different perspective–which I have to keep working on. It’s as if they bridge the gap between heaven and earth… scriptures often refer to them as messengers. Posing a personal question, what kind of message do I give to others? One of my favorite scriptures (reference Matthew 6:26 and 3 Nephi 13:26) talks about birds in the sense that God knows them and always takes care of them. As His children, God does the same for us, we just have to trust Him.

Your abstracts have such great colour and compositions. Explain your approach when you create these pieces. The abstracts reveal a lot of ideas and provide a place to show bold colours that I don’t use elsewhere, frankly, I find creating them personally refreshing. The lines with the earthy tones in the lower portions of my abstracts reference landscapes–and in a broader sense our connection to the Earth. Above, more open areas can represent the sky… Like the earth, our lives are made up of distinct layers–experiences, choices, memories, etc. The rest of the space I try to leave open to thoughts of change, growth or opportunities, and ideas that we are only a portal or passageway away from another realm or place, be it a more positive place in our lives, or from Heaven–hence the swirls near the top. Like my bird series, these also are about bridging a gap.

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Leslie Graff works in acrylics and mixed media to explore, in a variety of projects, a shared theme—the complexity of human experience. Her series Domestics is expansive, bold, and mildly mysterious. Her work has been exhibited in group and solo shows across the country in various museums, universities, and galleries and is held in many personal collections. She lives outside of Boston with her husband and three sons.

Talk about Domestics. Our experiences in life are for the most part intensely personal and private, we share some of our thoughts with others but for the most part the majority remains known only to us. My work primarily focuses on themes of identity, connection, relationships, and personal power. Things like chemistry, love, connection, and influence can’t be easily explained or measured but are such a part of our most meaningful experiences. The resonance of life is constantly on my mind. I am so intrigued by how unique our lives and experiences are and the ways we connect. The only way I can think to try to capture that is with art. I like my art to have a level of ambiguity and space for multiple interpretations and personal meaning because I think that echoes life. I have deep respect for the individual. We all see things a bit differently. Life is far more complicated and often involves a lot of overlapping dynamics, and tensions, that we are struggling through in life. Sometimes we live life too surfacey, afraid to spend much time in those complex spaces where its not all neat nice tidy answers.

My domestic series is primarily depictions of women (sometimes men- cause I do adore men) in domestic settings. It was first inspired by some aprons my great grandmother embroidered that were passed down to me. So it began as a self portrait exploration, the pieces are set in my home or locations with a lot of personal meaning for me, as it adds a reality and authenticity to the pieces. I saw these parallels between the tasks I did in my contemporary life, with the tasks my great grandmother did many decades prior. I had questions for myself about how family life has changed, what we outsource, and what creates meaning. I also saw how many deeper metaphors and tensions are found within domestic work or behaviors we do all the time. Each piece has a sub metaphor buried in it.

Like “she wanted to get out” is mostly about being trapped by self limiting behaviors, beliefs, and patterns that keep people from becoming what they want to be, most people view it at first glance thinking its about the confinement of domestic life that’s actually not my primary motivation in the piece. I think women today are still trying to negotiate their own relationship with their domestic roles . Other pieces like “want a slice” is about resource allocation, things that are finite like only having 24 hours a day. There is no way to change that, its all you get to work with, and it questions the deliberateness with which we allocate.  “Tuning in” is about connecting and refining relationships, developing deep, committed emotional presence. I used domestic artifacts to blur the context and historical settings so the pieces can say multiple things.

I love that these pieces connect with different people in different ways. Some women have shared how it makes them feel great purpose in domestic life, or increases their deliberateness. Others say it reminds them of their mothers or grandmothers. Some women say they relate because as working mothers they find themselves still dressed from work but jumping right into their family lives. I like that people can find their own connections. I do like that they draw attention to women and homes life. But I like to leave people their to think more on their own relationships as I don’t belief life is a one size fits all experience.

Women are a major part of this series. What is the status of women in the Church today? Where my graduate studies revolved around human development, identity, domestic life, roles, emotions, relationships, sexuality these are the subjects I am fascinated by and deep passionate about. I think as a religious culture, we are still leery of feminism, people have such strong reactions to the mere word. Not realizing what it has brought to the table and all we gain from it. I love that feminism taught us to speak up more and with first person voice, to me that is in such harmony with view of individual worth and personal revelation. It has taught me to use my voice as a woman, as a mother to speak to what I believe. My domestic series speaks to a lot of things but focuses on complexity of women’s experiences, many of the cultural shifts women have had to navigate especially since the 1950s and 60s (hence the domestic artifacts from those periods). I think we are still navigating a lot in the world today and in our religious culture. I think women have not necessarily been utilized in the church to their full potential in the past. I think there have been a lot of cultural beliefs or patterns that are perpetuated that are unhelpful.

Anyone who knows me knows I have no problem voicing my opinions and feelings, confidently no matter the setting. I had parents who really championed strong women and I was never at great odds, in my personal experience. But there are things I have encountered in relation to other’s views and experiences that can be unsettling and that make me think Whoa! our mindsets are very different. I think many times women have not always taken the initiative to step up and assert themselves, to be strong, powerful, deliberate, confident, contributing voices. We have often lacked for examples of good ways to do that. It is encouraging to see more and more opportunities for women to lead and teach and be seen for all of their capacities and I look forward seeing that grow. One of my favorite pieces is called “stirring things up” showing a woman with a mixing bowl. For me this piece is about using our voices to mix it up, to break from the status quo and not be afraid to share thoughts even if it might mean some disruption—but often in ways people don’t think—we may have to agitate one way with in our religious culture and in almost the opposite direction in our larger culture. I loved my graduate program for the way it taught me to be a critical thinker, to question assumptions and not be afraid to explore and ask questions within a faithful mindset. I know God loves intelligent, purposeful, thinking, useful, skilled, passionate, loving women. I believe so strongly in developing our talents and gaining knowledge and being useful in our homes, communities, workplaces, relationships, etc.

Visit Leslie Graff’s website.

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Nick Stephens has been creating commercial and fine art professionally for over ten years. He was born and raised in Utah and has lived and traveled throughout the western United States. His early creative mentors were Steve Egan and Scott Betz. More recently he has studied painting with professional artists John Horejs, Michael Malm, and William Whitaker. He also worked in an unofficial partnership with veteran special effects artist Clark Schaffer since 2008. He works from his in-home studio in Utah.

You work in a host of different media. Do you jump around or have you evolved from one area to another? Both. When I started selling professionally through a gallery, I was only selling my heavily textured mixed media pieces. I focused on those for several years, while experimenting with my other mixed media pieces as a personal artistic exploration, those experiments evolved into my current “style” that I work in most of the time now. I still get several requests for the original textural pieces, but I generally don’t make them anymore unless someone really wants them, and is willing to pay for them.

You’ve worked with your brother on pieces. How does the dynamic work between brothers in the creative process? My brother Brad and I have lived together for about twelve years, so we have well established routines and patterns of living. We have this habit of analyzing and discussing pretty much everything, from church doctrine to the design on a cereal box. Impromptu unstructured creative rambling is also a routine part of everyday life at our house. Historically it was me that did all the physical labor of painting and he was the trusty consultant, only recently have I worked intensely with him on the actual physical creation of art. But now he is making his own pieces, with me teaching him how to do all things that he has watched me do for years. Brad has a keen sense of artistic propriety and has a gift for inspired ideas coming to him. He also picks up on techniques rather quickly, which is good since I don’t have a ton of patience for teaching. Yes, there are disagreements, strong opinions, impassioned speeches and frustrations. But we genuinely like each other and there are really great times with super funny experiences and really cool art that comes out of it all in the end, and that makes it worth the effort. People that visit with us in our home are usually struck with the amount of creative activity in our lives, but to us it is so ingrained as part of what we do everyday that we don’t really even notice. It is only when we get out to other places that we realize just how odd we must seem to the average person.

Visit Nick Stephens website.