Ideal though they are as locales for viewing works of art, museums don't very often show an artist in the act of creating the piece. The Church History Museum in downtown Salt Lake City has sought to provide that opportunity for visitors with its periodic "Artists at Work" events, part of its "Evenings at the Museum" series.
The latest of these was the evening of March 4. Museum visitors saw five artists at work and had the opportunity to ask them questions and learn more about them. The artists were Richard Passey, leather tooler; Mark Buehner, book illustrator; Blair Buswell, sculptor; Suzanne Lancaster, gourd painter; and Lee Bennion, painter. Highlighted on these pages are these artists and some of their comments at the museum.
Richard Passey
Brother Passey started doing leather work 40 years ago while working at This Is the Place Monument, which marks the spot where President Brigham Young led the Mormon Pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. Working as a landscaper, he had time on his hands in winter and took up leather work as a hobby. A heart attack nine years ago gave him occasion to renew and refine his interest.
A leather pop-up book he had made 35 years previously appealed to his children, and they got him to make them each one for Christmas. He moved from there to more elaborate projects, including a book for President Gordon B. Hinckley's 95th birthday and one just recently presented to President Thomas S. Monson about his life.
He takes a project through five phases: basic tooling; giving it a three-dimensional effect through stretching of the leather; cutting parts away and filling in voids with leather dust combined with rubber cement; using ingenuity to fix errors and creating the pop-up books.
Seeing his talent as God-given, Brother Passey is working on the fifth in a series of 12 spiritual scenes. Titled, "As Thou Wilt," it depicts Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, His disciples asleep in the background.
Mark Buehner
Brother Buehner appeared with his wife, Caralyn, with whom he has collaborated on many children's books, he doing the illustrations and she the writing. Their books include the popular "Snowmen" series, including "Snowmen at Christmas," "Snowmen at Night" and "Snowmen All Year."
As spectators watched, he was at work on the fourth in the series, "Snowmen in the City."
Sister Buehner said they discuss concepts early on, because she has had the unhappy experience of selling a publisher on an idea and having Brother Buehner say he doesn't want to do it. She has worked with other artists but prefers her husband's work "because he's so much better," she said.
He will never take on a project he is not sold on, she said, because it is the pictures that sell the story, and it takes him a year to do the illustrations.
They have been collaborating for about 20 years and have done about a dozen books together.
"Art is such a crazy profession," Brother Buehner said, adding that it is rather distinctive for artists to be able to make a livelihood from their talent. It is easier to do so these days, Sister Buehner said, because resources are more plentiful for training and, because of technology such as digital imaging and e-mail, many artists are able to pursue their occupation without having to relocate to urban centers such as Los Angeles and New York.
In addition to his book illustrations, Brother Buehner does some scriptural subjects, such as the Good Samaritan. Sacred subjects are "extra powerful," he said, "because you start with a powerful scripture to begin with, and to try to bring it to a painting is satisfying."
The Buehners have nine children ranging in age from 4 to 25. They take satisfaction from the fact that their 4-year-old daughter will pick her parents' books above others that are in the family library.
Sister Buehner said just after her husband's graduation from college, he did some freelance work for the Ensign magazine. One depicted two LDS missionaries on a beach in Tonga. Three years ago, their son Grant left to serve a mission in Spain. It was hard for her as a mother to send him off. She worried about him. In his first area in Madrid, in the missionary apartment, his companion pointed to the bunk beds and offered the new elder his choice. Elder Buehner immediately selected the top bunk, because taped to the wall was a tear sheet from a Church magazine with the picture his father had done some two decades earlier for the Ensign. The experience, recounted in a letter to his parents, was an assurance to Sister Buehner that their son was being watched over.
Blair Buswell
Brother Buswell specializes in sports sculpture and western themes, reflecting his background as a running back for the football team at BYU (class of 1982) and his boyhood in a family that raised horses and during which he aspired to be like mountain man Jeremiah Johnson.
His first memory of art work is working with children's colored molding clay and toothpicks kept in a Sucrets lozenge tin. He would mix the colors together and form cowboys, Indians and race cars.
He has sculpted actor Charlton Heston, golfer Jack Nicklaus, pro-football hall-of-famers and Church President Harold B. Lee. The most challenging work of his career is a block-long bronze sculpture of a wagon train in downtown Omaha, Neb., on which he collaborated with two other artists.
Asked how he knows when his sculpture is finished, Brother Buswell exclaimed, "That's the hard part!" He joked, "It's finished when somebody comes and takes it away from me."
He explained that when one of his clay sculptures is bronzed, it will be divided into sections and coated with silicone rubber. Plaster is then put on the outside of the rubber. The resulting mold is taken to a foundry, where wax is poured in. The plaster is then removed, the rubber peeled off, resulting in a wax copy. The wax is dipped in a liquid clay slurry. The copy is coated with sand in stages. The product is then baked until the wax melts away. Molten bronze is then poured into the mold where the wax was. The ceramic shell is then chipped away, leaving a hollow bronze copy of the sculpture. The bronze sections are then welded together.
Brother Buswell prefers to work with live models, but he will often photograph or take a video of the model for reference in refining the piece.
Suzanne Lancaster
Sister Lancaster, a Salt Lake Valley native, has worked in oils, pencil, pastels, pen-and-ink, watercolors and acrylics, but her specialty is decorating gourds.
Asked how she got started with that unusual pursuit, she said she saw an ad for a gourd in a museum in St. George, Utah. She got a packet of gourd seeds and grew them, thinking her children would enjoy them. She soon found she liked them more than her children did.
She obtained instruction books from the library and began to develop her talent, first drying the gourds in her basement before painting them.
Sister Lancaster will put a wet towel around a gourd to soak it for about eight hours in preparation. "Then I get an Exacto blade, and I have to scrape off the outer skin that's really thin and waxy. Then it's ready to paint. Then you have to scrape out the insides and clean it out."
She has been interested in art since childhood and took some classes at the University of Utah, where she graduated with a degree in nursing. She reared three children before taking more art classes.
Today, her gourds are in demand with customers in California, Florida and elsewhere across the country.
Lee Udall Bennion
Sister Bennion lives with her family in Spring City, Utah, a town about 100 miles south of Salt Lake City that was settled by Mormons in the early 1850s and that has become something of a rural art colony.
Her art studio is in the upper level of a barn that she shares with the two horses she and her husband, potter Joseph Bennion, own. The studio has three skylights affording plenty of natural light for her oil paintings.
Twice a year, she opens the studio to the public. The first occasion is part of Spring City Heritage Day, which includes a tour of historic homes. The other occasion is the Spring City Artists Studio Tour on Sept. 11.
"I love painting people, especially women and children, but I can paint men," Sister Bennion said in a recent issue of the Horseshoe Mountain Pottery News in Spring City. "I also love to paint animals; dogs, cats and horses I have experience with but would enjoy trying other species.
"When I paint a portrait, I like to have one session whether I can draw some from life and also take photos. I only use the photos for the drawing phase, and just a little when painting. It is too easy to get sucked into trying to replicate the photo otherwise. I need the freedom to make it a stunning painting as well as a likeness."
