Spring is the subject but it is not the reason. I’m interested in showing marks made by my own hand. I like what I’ve made because of the way it looks. It’s about looking at paint, and feeling, not about talking.

 

Utah-based artist Downy Doxey-Marshall, a Salt Lake City native currently residing in Orem, Utah, is a seasoned creative professional with a diverse and impressive artistic journey.

 

With a career spanning over three decades, Downy has explored a myriad of artistic mediums, including watercolor, oil paint, egg tempera, pigmented ink, embroidery on raw linen, and mixed media. Her current focus involves creating large-scale oil paintings on canvas, drawing inspiration from the enigmatic beauty of the landscape.

 

Downy holds a BFA in painting and drawing from the University of Utah, and she further honed her skills by obtaining an MFA in painting and drawing from Brigham Young University. Her academic background lays the foundation for the depth and richness evident in her artistic expression.

 

Having participated in national and international exhibitions, Doxey-Marshall's work has earned acclaim not only from discerning art critics but also from a diverse array of corporate and private collectors. Her works can be found in collections such as: the State of Utah permanent collection, the Salt Lake City Public Library, St. George Art Museum, Springville Museum of Art, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and various corporate and private collections, including Delta Airlines and the Entrada Institute. 

 

Gilding the Lily: A Choreography explores the experience of growing up in a rural patch of New Jersey in the 1970’s. For the past three decades I have been creating botanical imagery.  It is only recently that I view my motivation for making this work in a different light.

 

When I was a child, my mother rented an apartment in the top floor of a carriage house. The carriage house was located on the grounds of an old 125-acre estate along the Hudson River called “Rio Vista”.  Other families rented the various buildings including the dairy, the garage and housing for workers. There was only a gravel road, so traffic was minimal. There were a lot of other kids, woods, dogs, and bikes.

 

I spent quite a bit of time in the woods, mostly solo, creating forts, tents, a lean to and a giant weaving suspended from a large tree branch. It has occurred to me that I was in dialogue with nature as a child.  The grass, dirt, sky, horse chestnuts, skunk cabbage, trees, rocks were my tools and a springboard for a creative life.

 

This childhood practice informed the abstracted botanical language I have developed over the past 40 years.  My penchant for making fantastical floral, vine, leaf, tree, and log imagery illustrates the distance most humans currently have with the natural world.  By inventing and fabricating an alternate natural world I am emphasizing my alienation from wilderness.

 

Laura Sharp Wilson is a multimedia artist whose practice is focused on painting, installation, and public art. Wilson’s paintings are distinguished by rendering with acrylic paint and graphite on mulberry paper adhered to a wood panel. Textiles and surface pattern design have long been a huge influence on the artist and are a primary element in her work. 

 

In 2016 Wilson's terrazzo floor design “Thread, Strand, Rope and Yarn” was installed in the Eccles Theater in downtown Salt Lake City. In 2022 her solo exhibition “From the Dining Room Table” was on display at McKenzie Fine Art in New York. In 2023 Laura’s work was included in “Roots of Resistance”at  MICA Gallery, Salt Lake City, “Wills Creek Survey”, Saville Gallery in Cumberland, MD and  “Abstraction from Nature” at  McKenzie Fine Art in New York. 

 

Wilson received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University.  The artist studied surface pattern design at North Carolina State University and served as an apprentice at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia. Wilson received an MFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In 2018 the artist was a resident at the Golden Foundation. Laura is currently part of a master class led by artists Shazia Sikhander and Holly Hughes at Anderson Ranch in Snowmass, Colorado.