Editor’s Note: Day 2 of the Utah Arts Festival coverage is focused on the artists. Tomorrow, look for a preview of the Fear No Film Festival

DID YOU KNOW?

On a large scale, there are several environmentally friendly measures that have gained a solid foothold at the Utah Arts Festival. Staff and volunteers are being especially vigilant about reducing the volume of waste that would end up at a landfill and ensuring that recyclable plastic, cardboard, aluminum, paper, and glass are being processed at locally owned plants within Utah.

Vegetable oil used at the food booths is sent to a local business that converts it into bio-diesel. The four-day event results in between 10 and 12 tons of garbage with a good portion of it being recycled, especially in glass and cardboard. Food waste also is composted. Also effective has been eliminating the use of plastic bags in disposal bins which results in an estimated savings costs of at least $4,000.

Festival volunteers also will be stationed throughout the festival grounds just for the purpose of helping visitors decide which bins they should use for disposing their plates, cups, and paper.

Organizers also have established a bike valet service and visitors who bicycle to the event get a $2 discount on their festival admission. Last year, nearly 1,200 used the service. In fact, almost a third of the bicyclists who use the valet service come on Saturday during the festival.

ARTIST MARKETPLACE

Represented among the more than 145 artists are techniques and media that often blend traditional approaches with barrier-bending and convention-breaking touches that clearly distinguish the work as a fresh 21st Century conception. There are 55 newcomers and 49 artists from Utah.

The list below is just a sampling of the many distinctly personal perspectives visitors will see at the festival, beginning this Thursday at Library Square. The artists’ marketplace will be open Thursday through Sunday from noon to 10 p.m. For more information, go here.

Steve Appel

A former shipyard welder who was laid off in 1989, Steve Appel of Prescott, Arizona, uses nuts, bolts, ball bearings and other metal fasteners to create more than 200 varieties of metal figures that are shown doing everything from riding horseback to sky diving. He has doctors practicing on patients, musicians, sport figures, and even pool players complete with a pool table including balls and pockets. Appel also designs pieces for individual requests such as a train engineer for a birthday gift or a figure blowing glass for a glass art gallery owner.

Appel’s art started as a hobby while he was still working at the shipyards and he occasionally sold his work at weekend art and craft fairs. After losing his job because of an economic recession, he turned his work into a full-time enterprise, doing more than 40 shows just in his first year. His pieces also have grown in complexity including a full tennis court with players as well a scene with a guy sitting in a chair watching TV, seven kids scrambling around the room, and, the piece de resistance, his wife about to clobber him with a rolling pin. More about his work can be found here.

Leia Bell

A native of Tennessee who started her art career more than 20 years ago selling crayon sketches in her neighborhood, Leia Bell moved to Utah, eventually earned her bachelor of fine arts degrees in printmaking from the University of Utah, and contemplated how to use her collegiate training.

After meeting Phil Sherburne (who would become her life and business partner), the owner of the all-ages rock music venue Kilby Court, Bell started creating small sets of colorful, eye-popping screenprinted posters promoting various performers – so appealing that they were regularly snatched by admirers from wherever they were posted. Among her many projects is Signed and Numbered, a gallery featuring collectible prints and posters – including those of artists throughout the United States and overseas – and local custom-built frames.

Today, Bell’s work, which also has graced the covers of virtually every independent magazine published in Salt Lake City , has earned a reputation well beyond the state’s border, including features in Newsweek, Print and Nylon magazines. This week, her series of three original screenprints depicting Utah’s varied urban and natural terrain is the thematic art for this year’s Utah Arts Festival, which will become a permanent part of the Artspace Gallery exhibition in downtown SLC in the festival headquarters. More about her work is found here.

Cynthia Duff

Cynthia Duff, who grew up in Denver, learned at an early age to appreciate nature and art watching her father paint landscapes. In high school, her art poster won a city-wide competition, which she says, in her biographical statement, gave her the epiphany: “It was at that time I realized my passion in life was to be an artist and Commercial Art was my way to make a living.”

In the 1980s, she moved to Grand Island, Nebraska to run a family business and worked as a freelance artist, becoming extensively involved in the local art scene, establishing a park event that now attracts more than 100 exhibitors, and creating the Grand Island city logo. The city is known internationally as a migrating point for the Sand Hill Cranes, a fact that inspired many of her paintings. Just a little less than five years, Duff decided to devote all of her energies to her creative work, set up a studio in Grand Junction, Colorado, and now uses a variety of elements to orchestrate her art on paper, canvas, word or metal, drawing intent focus on the chemistry of color and the rhythm of shapes. More of her work can be featured here.

Michael Leu

Like many other artists featured at this year’s festival, Michael Leu, who was born in Taipei. gained his first recognition as a child, winning first place in an international children’s painting contest in Tokyo. He studied art in Taiwan and then honed his printmaking skills in California, where he lives today. In many of his travel landscapes, Leu combines color and elements to reflect the juxtaposed yet simultaneous effects of a native-born innocence and the worldly sophistication of a tourist who knows how to appreciate the small and large treasures of visiting a new land. Colors and images are vibrant, immediately instilling a well-deserved sense of happiness and light-hearted amusement. More about his work can be found here.

Tom Mills

Tom Mills of Midway, Utah, is a graduate of Penn State University where he studies photography. Working as a newspaper reporter, this Pennsylvanian native quit his job and moved west in 1991 and started shooting photo art shortly after arriving in Park City. He has mastered his print and mounting techniques allowing for 30 x 40 enlargements which still keep a tight grain integrity and everything used in the mounting process is acid free, including the ink in which he signs the prints. More about his work can be found here.

Mariana Palova

One of the youngest artists featured this year, Mariana Palova, who lives and works in Mexico, will turn 20 just days after the festival but her work is gaining attention rapidly for a strikingly original take on neo-surrealism. While she is studying graphic design, her passion always has been based in art and her work and approach have come completely on her own instincts and constant practice. Inspired by a brief stint as a fashion model, Palova started experimenting with self-portraits, and had her first exhibition at 17. Her artistic statement starts as follows: “I am my own model in almost all my pieces, sometimes the people take this like a reflection of vanity. But my work is not a self portrait of me, my body is just an instrument, a tool that I use to create my art, that is why sometimes I am unrecognizable in my own works.” More about her work can be found here.

Shizuko Shichishima

A graduate of the College of Bunka Joshi (an art and craft school) in Tokyo. Shizuko Shichishima has been creating hand-crafted traditional Japanese ceramics for the past 30 years. After moving to the United States, she became involved in jewelry making and needle work, while continuing with her passion for the ceramic arts. She has been shown at various galleries throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and participates in approximately 30 fairs and festivals every year. More about her work can be found here.

Larry Stephenson

Larry Stephenson, a watercolor artist from Andover, Kansas, has created two bodies of work: Toyz featuring antique toys and the other featuring angling art and fly fishing paintings. The retro and whimsical elements are unmistakable in his work which clearly communicate his passions for toys and fishing. It is a definitively original representation of American pop culture. More about his work can be found here.

Julie Stutznegger

One of this year’s returning award winners, Julie Stutznegger has been working with stained glass since 1995, and has been fusing glass since 2005. Her glass artwork comprises multiple layers of glass powder applied to sheet glass and then, through several firings, the layers dissolve into and around each other, and form unique results. As she notes in her biographical statement: “I love the textural possibilities of working with glass powder. … One of my favorite things about working with powdered glass is the spontaneity. The reaction of powder in the kiln can be anticipated and controlled (to a certain point) prior to firing, but it will often do what it pleases when left alone in the kiln. The grainy, jagged, scaly, or wrinkly surface that emerges from the kiln is sometimes a surprise, but again and again, I marvel at the beautiful behavior of glass.” More about her work can be found here.