Maureen O’Hara Ure is a Professor Lecturer at the University of Utah, College of Fine Arts teaching Art 2400 for first year studio majors, Drawing I, and Senior Seminar. She has received many grants in support of her work, including the most recent one from the College of Fine Arts, which helped fund two large projects: "Love & Work", a solo show of paintings, and the publication of an artist’s book. "Seeing and Believing: A Traveler’s Sketchbook", the third volume to appear under her imprint, The Hand in Glove Press, features O’Hara Ure’s responses to the Romanesque art and architecture encountered in central France.
This year Red Butte Press has published "Stranger and Stranger", a bestiary composed of her images and poems by fellow University of Utah professor Katharine Coles, having collaborated for over three decades. O'Hara Ure's next solo exhibit, “Art History,” will open February 15th at Phillips Gallery.
“For almost 20 years, all my major projects have started off with travel, with my drawing in museums and at historical sites overseas. In each case, my travel sketchbooks have focused on pre-Renaissance art and architecture. I have returned to the studio and set about using the raw ideas in the sketchbooks to begin developing new work, feeling free to take liberties with the historical material I collected. Much of the work in “Art History”, my exhibit of new paintings at Phillips Gallery, is narrative. At some point in developing an image, I start to think of this or that beast or landscape as standing in for myself or for a family member in a kind of short story (or poem) that recalls love and loss, joys and sorrows.
Relying on a sturdy panel to hold up to months, sometimes years, of revisions, I slowly build up an image, obsessively laying down marks in thin, sanded layers of paint, ink, and pencil. When a panel returns to my studio from a show, I may begin to tinker with the image, perhaps first sanding out or painting over just a section. Often as not, I keep going and start all over, using gesso to erase any memory I have of the painting. I can see, for example, from my scribbled notes on the back of one of the oldest long panels in “Art History” that I first began to develop its surface in 2007, and three years later judged it finished and included it in my 2010 solo show at Phillips. After beginning to radically revise that painting last summer it is now unrecognizable, and, as “Panorama”, hangs here as part of this new collection.” —Maureen O’Hara Ure
WHERE: Phillips Gallery444 East 200 South Salt Lake City, UT 84111
WHEN: Opening 2/15, Gallery Stroll from 6-9P. The exhibition will be on display from 2/15 to 3/8
