Joanna Cutri is a globetrotting painter (and popular yoga instructor). She was born and raised in Pasadena, California to parents from Argentina who were both converts to the LDS church. At age six she moved back to Argentina and then back again to Pasadena. She studied art in Cleveland; Salt Lake City; Cortona, Italy; and received a BFA from the University of Georgia. She then lived in Bali for ten years and just recently moved to Biarritz in the south of France with her French fashion designer fiancée. These paintings are from her series of the Zhangjiajie Mountains in China.

Tell us about your evolution as an artist. I’ve always been an artist. I was incredibly blessed and fortunate to have been able to attend the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. I owe that school EVERYTHING. It completely changed my life. And after having lived in Bali for over 10 years being fully immersed in the culture and religion, it became absolutely clearly obvious that this has been my spirit for many lifetimes. I’m playing out my pre-ordained destiny. My calling and purpose as an artist is simply a manifestation in THIS lifetime. The Balinese are all proud artists, it is a highly respected and honored position, which they value and cultivate. In Bali I discovered the strength of my artistic voice, my worth and how important -crucial!- it is for me, for all artists, to continue on this path. Bali is like the ultimate playground for an artist. I had tons of space and tons of time, so size and quantity was no object in terms of canvas. Now living in France I’ve had to scale down a lot, my canvases are smaller and when the house is literally stacked up with art, I have to set a limit.

Creating art has always been this intense cathartic process. I never plan anything; I have absolutely no idea what is going to come out. It simply just happens. And most of the time at the end of a collection, I’m surprised wondering where it all came from. Spirit moves though me. It’s never an intellectual endeavor either. The approach and technical style of my paintings are always similar starting with collage. I love working with paper. My earliest memory at six years old is of shredding a newspaper into a million pieces and collaging it back together into this snow scene of a snowman family. I have a HUGE box of paper that I have been lugging around the world for years. Then my paintings are layers upon layers of mixed mediums. I’m a bit of a rebel when it comes to “painting”. With so much choice in diverse materials, I can’t imagine just using one, so I use them all. It’s an exploration of materials all left to chance. The concept or imagery always changes with each series. It usually reflects where I’m at in my life. My paintings are “landscapes” of my whole life. What has changed or evolved is the sense of urgency I feel now that I didn’t feel at 20. I feel like I haven’t created enough and that time is running out. I’m acutely aware that the time is NOW…or never. I either need to paint faster or find a way to expand time.

You’ve done a fair bit of globetrotting. Tell us how these travels have shaped your art. Traveling around the world is simply the way I live. I can’t seem to stay in one place for too long. It took me five years to finish my BFA after having gone to six different schools to get thru it. I have to see the world and live in different countries soaking it all in and then go hide in my studio and let it all come out. Every country has impacted my art. Every place has something special that causes me see things differently back in the studio. I’m the ultimate observer of my immediate surroundings, I notice everything, the most mundane details that most walk by and don’t pay attention to- like the texture of patterns on certain buildings in Paris that remind me of curly pasta, or shadows being projected on the sand in Krabi, Thailand by people dancing in front of party lights. Those discoveries and experiences while traveling are the answers to the creative problem solving process in the studio. They become a catalyst for wanting to recreate a characteristic on the canvas whether it be how to create a translucency like the light in Rote Island which is so crisp and clear or wanting to mix a perfect earth color like the vibrant land in Western Australia. It’s like taking the best part of my travels and not wanting to forget them, immortalizing them on my canvas. It’ s never obvious or so literal to the viewer, but all my travels are in my paintings one way or another.

You once said, “As an artist I need inspiration. I need stimulation.” Explain. I paint in solitude and to really get into creation mode I have always chosen places quite far removed, the makings of my own little bubble. After high school the obvious and easiest choice would have been to study art in LA or NYC like every person I went to school with, but I ended up living in Cortona, Italy which is a tiny Tuscan hill town virtually detached from anything. When I needed stimulation- people, museums, energy and a sensory overload of distractions, I would go to Florence 90 minutes away. Yet when I lived in the center of Milan, I rarely painted. Painting is a very solitary activity and being alone too much in the middle of nowhere like Bali can make you a bit loopy and claustrophobic. Being so isolated and in a very different reality to the Western world I had to travel extensively to absorb as much as I could, to fill my well of creativity. Back in my studio, I’m forced to dig deep into my own reservoir of inspiration and not be distracted by my immediate surroundings or by what is happening in popular culture or trend. I’m a huge contradiction; I can’t be living in chaos and create, I want to be out, be social and doing everything I possibly can, all at once. Yet when I’m creating, my world stops and I have to be alone and as far away as possible from any temptations of worldly delight. I can be incredible focused or totally ADD. Life is about contrast though…

What’s up next for you? I am en route to Hong Kong to present my latest collection to the Nock Art Foundation. In 2016 I hope to travel to various Asian Art Museums globally to share this experience as a lecture series and to exhibit this body of work. The premier viewing will be a selection of paintings shown at the Musee Asiatica here in Biarritz on January 9th. This has been a very interesting year full of change. I ended a decade in Bali with an artist in residency program in Hong Kong. I was chosen to participate in this cultural exchange of four Western artists painting the Zhangjiajie Mountains (the floating mountains of the movie Avatar) in the Hunan Province in China. It was an amazing experience. I’m not a plein air landscape artist at all and I was completely thrown out of my comfort zone on every level. On my own, I would have never gone to China to paint the most impressive landscape eight hours a day for seven days straight. It was really quite special and interesting to push the boundaries of creating in a completely new way. I ended up developing the collection in the south of France in Biarritz the last 8-9 months. These last few months have forced me to reflect on the severe contrast of east and west and how it relates and transpires in my work and in my life.

Visit Joanna Cutri’s website.

Leslie O. Peterson started painting three years ago at the age of 57. Her recent series of watercolors was profiled in The New York Times: Mormon Leader Joseph Smith’s 34 Wives Inspire Utah Artist. She explains, “At first, I was angry. Why the heck have I not known this? These women have become like ghosts in our history, and we don’t teach or talk about their lives. I just felt the need to get these women out of the closet and let people learn about them and celebrate them.” Peterson lives in Utah.

Tell us about how you got started with the project. I have always been interested in polygamy, and had read a little about Joseph Smiths’s polygamy, but because it was not talked about in Church I thought it might be anti-Mormon propaganda. After the Church released the essay about Joseph Smiths’s polygamy in 2014 and admitting he could have had as many as 40 wives and many young girls, I decided to do a little research on my own. Painting these women were my way of processing the new information. I fell in love with these woman and found their stories to be fascinating.

What has been the response to The New York Times article? We made a short film (6 minutes) about the project and entered it in the Radio West film competition at the Tower Theater in June of 2015, it won 2 of the 3 awards. A reporter from The New York Times saw it and wrote an article that came out Aug 18, 2015. We had a huge burst of sales and newspapers from around the world published articles about the project. I was surprised by the unexpected attention it received.

How did you start painting? My daughter offered to pay for a community education class if I would take her husband as a form of therapy for him—he had suffered a massive stroke while playing rugby. We painted together for a year until they adopted twins and he became a stay at home dad.

What are you working on next? I am now painting LDS women in a new series called Church Ladies. I want to honor and celebrate the diversity of women in the Church today. I am also doing small commissions and enjoying a wide range of topics and styles.

Visit Leslie O. Peterson’s website.

Images courtesy Leslie O. Peterson, The New York Times, and the St. George News.

Jena Schmidt is an abstract painter with a unique, organic style. Schmidt graduated from Brigham Young University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting. She lives in Utah.

Tell us about your background and development as an artist. I’ve grown up with a love for art. My mom was an art major and designer so I was influenced by her and always had a desire to create, no matter the genre. I started taking art seriously when I started college at Utah Valley University. The summer after I graduated high school, I saw an exhibit at the UMFA of Hyunmee Lee’s big abstract paintings, which I was awe-struck about. I later found out she taught at UVU and ended up taking classes from her for two years which greatly influenced my decision to pursue an art career. I then moved on to BYU where I got my BFA in studio arts. The program and professors there encouraged us to really think conceptually about the art we were creating and I realized that all of my art was always coming out organically with ties to nature. From there, I kept working on the development of a fresh perspective of landscape. Because we have photography, the Internet, and a long history of landscape painting, this is an over-digested subject matter yet something so inherently rooted in my system that I can’t escape it. I have been painting this endless subject matter for five years since and the idea of searching for new and imagined landscapes keeps painting an outlet for this ever-unfolding exploration.

It was written about you, “Schmidt has come to recognize a symbiotic relationship with her surroundings, and her landscapes depict a particularly contemporary way of thinking.” Explain. Growing up in Utah has engrained the landscape in me. The Wasatch Mountains are right in your face every day, we drink the water that drain down the canyon streams. I constantly find myself zooming in on little pieces of land where the trees grow in a particularly interesting shape, or the snow has fallen to make negative space on the mountain. Spending a lot of time in a landscape like this has led me to ask a lot of questions about my relationship to it. How small am I compared to its grandiosity? What’s going on in the canyon when the clouds are laying low and I can’t see? Since the landscape is not flat, you can’t see for a distance, my mind wanders to question what’s on the other side; what new place is there for me to discover and paint? These curiosities are the driving force for my work, and as said before, I want to find a way to express this winding exploration in a contemporary way. I want to create the atmosphere that people can relate to without telling them the whole story.

I find your choice of colors particularly ethereal. What is your process for starting a new piece? I collect a lot of photos of landscapes I’ve traveled in and a lot I haven’t been to or that are on my list to travel to. I spend time looking researching on Google maps, and zooming in on places like Banff or the Black Forest in Germany that seem mysterious and beautiful to me and move my mouse around until I find a good composition. I make a lot of sketches that combine these images and play around with the shapes or insert lines to denote a journey. A lot of times I will make a small painting sketch on paper and then play around with it in Photoshop until I get the colors and shapes I want. Then I will translate that into a painting.

What are you working on next? Currently I am working on some small works for the Small Business Saturday at Utah Museum of Contemporary Art the weekend after Thanksgiving, the Honoring Utah Artists show at Alpine Art, and on a solo show in Telluride, CO in February. These will all be a continuation of my “Black North” landscape series. After that, and in the mean time, I am working on developing a more colorful, playful series based on the time I have been spending in Colombia.

Visit Jena Schmidt’s website.

Visit Jena Schmidt’s Etsy shop.

Chelsea Steinberg Gay is a sculptor, welder, artist, and creative soul. She received a BFA in Sculpture from SUNY Purchase. As she explains, “In the last three years I have been focusing on my own ancestry: generations of Jewish European immigrants, Holocaust victims and survivors, and life-long New Yorkers. I often work from my memories of growing up Jewish, in the city. Against this background of Jewish themes and issues, my most recent work has been an inquiry into the culture and religious practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day saints into which I married and converted. I examine orthodox Mormonism through the lens of the secular, socialist Judaism in which I was brought up, never fully immersed in one world or the other.” Gay lives in New York City.

Tell us about your evolution as an artist. I started taking art classes regularly around age 12, in Brooklyn, New York, where I was born and raised. I learned from friends’ parents, from hanging around movie sets where my dad was working as an electrician, where I shadowed scenic artists, and from public school art teachers. I went to the Brooklyn museum for classes as both a toddler and a teen. I was accepted to LaGuardia High School as an art major, and from that point onwards I was making art full-time, both in studio classes at school and whenever I had a spare moment. I started welding classes at age 15 and made a little steel sculpture that got me into the art program at SUNY Purchase. When I wasn’t on campus there I was making sculpture in my parents basement and taking classes at the Art students league or the Compleat Sculptor. I tend to forget how much formal art training I’ve had over the years, when I was hunting for MFA programs I was sort of stunned at how poor many really notable schools facilities were; Purchase really spoiled me, especially when it came to bronze casting. I learned all that I know and do now at Purchase, I owe those professors a huge debt of gratitude. My bronze castings keep my lights on, which in turn allows me to do whatever I please in my studio. I used to scavenge for weird or unusual objects, and I really like thrift shops and consignment stores. My grandfather is a bit of a hoarder, and I made some of my first sculptures on his farm in South Carolina when I’d visit, since he had mountains of every conceivable bit of fascinating trash, from cast glass perfume bottles in the shape of ladies in fancy dresses to a full-size school bus that was inhabited by countless hornets, decaying on the side of a dirt road near where he kept his goats. His cows ate out of a giant abandoned tire, which held their feed amazingly well. I think that the urge to find and use some kind of relic or prop, or to make something that feels like such an object is at the root of a lot of what I do. A professor once told me that I’m an object-maker at heart, which I think is essentially true. I also like installations and performances, but on a day-to-day basis I tend to make objects. Beauty is crucially important to me. Another professor taught me that your art has to strike at the gut—hit the primary impulse first, the secondary, cognitive, impulse second. If something is visually appealing, not necessarily cute or pretty, but satisfying to look at I think of it as successful. I’ve evolved from someone who had no particular direction, to someone who works towards an idea of making something that satisfies certain requirements, that it is visually provoking, stems from a genuine place and has a strong sense of self as an object – if an object can have that sense…I like the finished works to have a kind of personality, to be true, even if that truth is only in the act of yearning to be true, or of the truth inherent in questioning to reveal something genuine.

You once wrote, “I am working to create a visual language, which makes Latter-day Saint symbolism more accessible to others.” I wrote this for a failed application to a graduate school program, then I put the whole thing on my website because I liked the way it flowed together. That is just one of the aims of my work, but it’s probably the most convoluted. I suppose the question I might get from people would be why even bother? The Church goes to great lengths to make its concepts very simple and clear. As an international organization that does significant work in developing countries, this simplicity is paramount. The symbolism I’m talking about has been represented in countless ways – take my “Righteous Priest” Masks (above). Literally, you could represent the idea of the priesthood with historical paintings or images of men – or women – giving blessings. But that’s not really the kind of visual language I’m talking about. The best creators of new languages take you away from the familiar into their own realities – Joseph Beuys and his visual language, for example, where each material he used was imbued with a special symbolism that was connected to an origin myth that he created, or Anthony Burgess, who created the language used in the film Quest for Fire, or in his book A Clockwork Orange. These were artists and writers who sought to speak their own truth by pulling their audience out of a literal space and into a symbolic one, and to my thinking that makes their work all the more rich and thrilling, albeit demanding and sometimes alienating. So, to look at my “Righteous Priests” through that lens of a visual language, what is there now? African mask references, men’s dress shoes, (worldly claim to authority, where one stands, where one is grounded), a hierarchy of materials… everything this represented symbolically, visually, the concepts are virtually all LDS. In terms of the reference to African masks, there is the issue of race and the priesthood, and the inexcusable history of the church barring men of color from holding the priesthood. As it happened, the church is inextricably tied to Africa for me, as that is where my in-laws served a mission, it is where my husband works as a humanitarian aid professional, and it is where I found myself seeing the church’s humanitarian work, which broke down some of the barriers in my hardened, acerbic little heart. The challenge of creating a visual language that makes LDS more accessible to others is all about how successfully the piece is executed. Ideally, a beautiful or fascinating object will draw a viewer in, and have them asking questions, in a way that a literal or figurative work of art can’t always do. The work doesn’t have a goal to bring people to any one perspective, but to take these concepts – a priesthood on earth, laden with all the complications of being humans on the earth – and to hold up a prism to the ideas, allowing them to refract and allow for people to bring in their own perspectives on the subject, to find their own way in to the concept at the heart of the work.

The nest and the obelisk are recurring images in your work. What reverberates with you regarding these? The nest is pretty literal for me. I made the first of my nests to cope with transitioning into motherhood. I had a lot of people telling me I was at the end of making art, since I was going to be a mom now. Those people were idiots, but I was scared enough of losing myself in motherhood that I started to make nests, trying to think about the concept of being the head of a family, of being a parent, of managing a household, and how the women before me had done it…I had no idea, but it was a good way to kill a bit of time before the baby came, and in the end people responded really strongly to the nest. A friend of mine makes them also, for the same reason – people like them, they sell…everyone’s got to pay the bills. On a deeper level, though, how many mother-artists are there, really? When you look at the impossibility of being an artist, and then dump being a mother on top of that, it’s a lot to manage, and many people don’t make it work. Many do, also, but they’re often mum on how it’s done. So the nests are about mother-anxiety, about home making, and puttering around and finding balance…until the nest is done, and the babies fly and you get a cat. As for obelisks, I really fell in love with them because of Edward Gorey. My parents house in Brooklyn is a block away from Greenwood Cemetery, and there’s obelisks in there too. Something about them is deeply satisfying, visually. I did some homework and found out that the obelisk predates the cross, that they’re originally from Egypt, but are also in Ethiopia, which I visited years ago with my husband, and fell madly in love with, and that there are also plundered obelisks amidst sunken ship wreckage at the bottom of the sea. They’re staggeringly beautiful in person, and the concept behind them is the ascent to God. The line draws your eye up to the heavens. The cross was the intersection of that vertical infinity of God and the horizontality of human death. I like the former concept, also, as a Jew I struggle with crosses a bit. I may have converted to the LDS church, but I’ve never been able to help being a Jew, just look at the first part of my surname, it’s my ethnicity, being a native New Yorker only exacerbates it. The obelisk feels ancient in a way that is thematically safe, in a pre-Christian way. Suffice it to say, I’m more comfortable in my Jewish-themed work than I am in my Mormon-themed work.

What’s next for you? I do very little showing, maybe twice a year in very unglamorous circumstances, because I’m fortunately swamped with commissions or children most of the time. I spent a couple years looking through all these graduate programs for fine artists, and when I finally thought I found a great fit, they didn’t accept me. Once I started chatting with MFA students regularly I realized that I wasn’t really into the idea of a fine art graduate program, I mean, I’m not desperately in need of studio art classes, and I’ve been working consistently for well over a decade, what I needed was to be better researched on my subjects, lucky me I got accepted to a grad program in Jewish Art and Visual Culture at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. I began a series a few years ago on my paternal Ashkenazi lineage, on being a New Yorker, and a Jew and all the complications of that, I made Emet – my golem – based on an old legend out of Prague, but when I went to further my research to make new work I hit upon a series of barriers, the least of which was language. JTS is getting me through those barriers and giving me fuel for the next thing, which is not only to continue examining the Jewish/Mormon intersections that I find so interesting, but also to dig deeper into my Jewish roots. If it wasn’t for the sense of a loving God that I found as a Bat Mitzvah student and Camp Kinderland kid, I’d never have joined the church in the first place, and if I hadn’t joined the church, I doubt my yearning to understand my mother religion and culture (well, one of them, my mother is Southern Baptist, descended from Scotch-Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch immigrants,) would be nearly as strong. So I’m getting my MA, and I’ll be taking my family with me when I do my internships at museums, hopefully one in Tel Aviv and one in Prague, and I’m going to keep making art all the time, it’s been just about 20 years of me making art, I’m not really interested in quitting now, God willing, I can keep it up, and maybe show and sell a bit, too.

Visit Chelsea Steinberg Gay’s website.

Donate to Gay’s husband’s non-profit (Engage Now Africa) to raise money for the women and children they are helping to escape from slavery and human trafficking in Uganda, Ethiopia and Ghana.