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Joe Ostraff and Dan Toone & showing concurrently in Dibble Gallery: Bill Patterson

Presented by Phillips Gallery at Phillips Gallery

May 21-June 11, 2010

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Growing up in Southern California, mixed media painter Joe Ostraff was influenced by the local artists and surrounding arts culture. He participated in the Laguna Beach Pageant of the Masters and, as Ostraff says, "painted everything from beachscapes to surfers in a glassy tube ride with off shore winds". He came to Utah to earn a BFA from BYU and later went on to receive an MFA from the University of Washington. He is married to an ethnobotonist. They along with their six children have had some amazing travel experiences due to his wife Melinda's work. Studying the people from remote parts of the world and making alliances across cultures has greatly influenced his work. Those cross culture relationships are the bases of his current body of work: "It is based on personal experiences and the questions that arise from those experiences." Currently, Ostraff serves as a professor at BYU where he just completed his 18th year teaching. Dan Toone was raised on a farm in Spokane, WA. It was there that he developed a deep love and fascination for nature and, driven by the beauty around him, he began to sketch. In 1975 he took a job welding metal in Salt Lake City, UT. His welding skills increased and so did his ideas for what he might create, artistically, with metal. It wasn't long before he began designing furniture and then sculpture. Today, the inspiration for his pieces continues to derive from the natural world. Shiny and rusty, curved and geometric, his use of these contrasting elements combine to create strong elegant design. "The most rewarding part for me is taking the normally rigid and structural steel and turning it into smooth unconstrained flowing lines similar to those found in nature." Showing concurrently in our Dibble Gallery (downstairs): Studio nudes by Bill Patterson. Photographed in black and white, Patterson's figures are a straight forward look at the real (non-stereotypical) female form. "In my long experience photographing and drawing the figure I have found that from the artists perspective, women of every age and shape have their own unique beauty".