Paige Crosland Anderson’s magnificent triptych artwork “Again, Glorified” was recently purchased by Brigham Young University Museum of Art and is on loan at the Church’s Museum of Art in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is a glorious work to see and an even richer experience to perceive with an understanding of Paige’s aesthetic worldview. She views the repetitive aspects of human—and spiritual life—as a kind of “sacralization of the mundane”. Repeated patterns of discipleship work together toward a sacred whole. Watch Paige’s sage and informative comments on this particular piece. In the video, Paige gives insight into how she approaches her artwork – and her life, for that matter.
“Quilting has been a major influence in my life for a long, long time. When I was at BYU I was trying to find a visual language to describe the visual themes I was working through at the time. These were themes of inheritance and succession and connected to ancestry an genealogy. My grandma’s a quilter. I was thinking “Quilts are inherited, and families are patterns….When I had my first baby I was [having a hard time] finding meaning in all the monotony. I still was just drawn to the patterns around me – rows of windows or the cobblestones or laundry hanging on a line. I asked myself “What is it about repetition that is so powerful to me?” This is what all of life is about. It’s all these repeated acts that we engage in that form a life. Discipleship, prayer, service – it’s these repeated patterns of engagement. I have to contextualize my work in a religious way.”
I recently enjoyed getting virtually acquainted with Paige and learning about her life, values, and the aesthetic vision that inspires her artwork.
Segullah: Tell us a bit about your growing up years, Paige. Were there early influences on your life as an artist?
Paige: I grew up in Provo, Utah, surrounded by lots of extended family on both sides. I feel lucky that both sets of grandparents had homes that were filled with art. Creative pursuits always seemed like legitimate ones.
My dad’s dad was a theater professor at BYU and was in several LDS movies (Buttercream Gang, anyone?). He also made bonsai trees and would help my grandma create dramatic displays for the trade shows she’d attend (she was a sales rep for various food companies like Green Giant etc.) I saw the value that a creative mind had in a group.
My mom’s dad was a brilliant mathematician and was the department chair of mathematics at BYU. He was also an art collector of a wide variety and genre. His collection included bronze sculptures, photorealistic paintings, paintings with a more naive style, abstract paintings, a modernist wood sculpture taller than me, landscapes, portraits, historical scenes… I saw that it was all valued, and valued and enjoyed by someone who I saw as the end-all of sophistication and success. I didn’t ever once question as a child, if going into art would be seen as a less-than-optimal career choice. Quite the opposite in fact.
My dad’s parents gave me an easel from the old BYU academy when I was in 6th grade (he had saved it from a dumpster years earlier), and it’s the easel I still paint on today. My aunt commissioned my first oil painting. I had never made an oil painting in my life, but had always loved to draw, watercolor, and dabble in acrylic. I set up in my grandparent’s carport and my extended family watched the progress. She bought my supplies and paid me $100. I was floored!
My parents have also always been interested and supportive. Art kits for Christmas, encouraging me to pursue what I clearly loved doing…I am really lucky in that way.
I’m the second child of four kids. 3 girls, and a boy on the end. I’m the middle sister. My dad was an archeologist in the Great Basin region when I was a kid and knew all sorts of cool hikes and places to explore. We spent a lot of family trips camping, hiking, exploring…My mom was, and still is, in the Utah Valley Symphony. She plays the violin; so do I. I have many memories of attending her concerts at the old Provo Tabernacle.
My parents definitely encouraged a love of the outdoors, a love of music, a love of games and being together with family, a love of travel. We grew up very close and still are.
Segullah: What is your family life like now?
Paige: I currently live in Salt Lake City with my husband, Michael, and our four daughters who range in age from 4 to 13. Michael is very creative, though not in a visual arts way, per se. He has a creative mind that is able to see problems from many sides. He’s a great writer. He can come up with innovative solutions. He’s a great conversationalist.
Our daughters all love making things in the studio. It ranges from paintings to miniature sculptures, to comic books, to Play-Doh dinners, and the oldest three play instruments. They all love art and music and the outdoors like their mama. I am very much in a schlepping phase, haha!
Mike’s work is very demanding and he’s gone from about 7-7 nearly every day, so the majority of the housework, getting kids ready for school and activities, practicing, driving, shopping, cooking, etc. falls to me. I’m lucky I’ve never had to have another job outside of making art so when the girls are in school (some days that’s only a couple hours in the morning) I go straight downstairs to paint and try to close my eyes to the various household tasks that need doing. It has always worked so far, to mostly paint while the girls are sleeping (I have learned to love the quiet, still mornings when everyone is still asleep or slowly waking up) or at school.
Segullah: When did you recognize you were creative/artistic? How did that manifest itself?
Paige: I don’t remember a moment like that. I just know I have always, always loved to create. As a kid I was always drawing and painting, and probably because I was encouraged by family. “Wow, that looks great!” “Make me a picture like that!” “Can you draw one of my garden for me to put on the fridge?” I never really stopped drawing and painting. Their interest and encouragement were/are true gifts.
Segullah: Where did you study?
Paige: I went to BYU and got a BFA. As a kid, I took an art lesson here and there, but never really liked being told what to paint, so mostly was self-taught until going to BYU. I have created a process and style that is uniquely my own and that came from trying to pin down a visual language in college and the strong interest I had in artists whose processes informed the meaning of their art. Ann Hamilton, for example.
Segullah: Are there other artists whose work you admire or are influenced by?
Paige: Admittedly, I wish I spent more time looking at art. Ha! When my husband had a business trip in Warsaw about seven years ago, I tagged along and spent the entire day—literally open to close—at the National Gallery there. It was one of the best days of my life. I encountered works I had never seen before, but could spend all day learning from.
I don’t have a “favorite artist” per se. I feel like I am a very wide-ranging appreciator (like my grandpa!). I love medieval art, wood carvings, thick gloppy landscapes, fine portraits, interesting takes on familiar subjects, textiles, and installations. I love to get up close to a canvas and see what colors are juxtaposed and how they work together, I love texture. I love photographs. I need to get back to a museum.
Segullah: What besides creating art do you like to spend time doing? Sports? Parenting? Retreating into, dark forests to be quietly alone at last?
Paige: In a world in which I had more spare time to do what I loved (life feels like a never-ending game of Tetris these days) I’d go hiking more often. I told my girls we were doing a hike a week over the summer and mostly stuck to that goal. I have the same thrill of discovering a physical landscape that I do a painting. The up-close, textures, rocks, and plants working together to create just stunning compositions feel parallel to the way I get close to paintings (close enough to have gotten several “Ma’am, take a step back, please” from security guards) and then stepping back to see how it plays at a distance.
I love seeing how a few marks can evoke a subject. In that same way, a few elements can create a masterpiece of nature. For this same reason, I love gardening.
I love reading and always have several books in progress.
I love snuggling my girls, going on walks, decorating my house, hosting dinner parties and concerts (we just wrapped our 4th summer of hosting local musicians in a backyard concert series), singing in the car and in church, playing piano and violin duets with my girls, telling jokes, playing games, gathering with friends, and one of my favorite things is reading on my grandma’s quilt spread out on the grassy hill in the backyard with my girls as the summer sun goes down.
Segullah: Never a dull moment at your house, I guess!
Segullah: Tell us about the “Certain Women” show in Provo, Utah, this Spring. So many fabulous artists! How was that?
Paige: SO MANY fabulous artists. I was glad to be a part of it. When I was walking through the exhibit I was just floored at the diversity and quality of the work. It’s pretty amazing to know some of these women, and pretty amazing we are part of the same “tribe.” I felt my Mormon pride swell as I took it all in. There is real talent in our little band. It was also so cool to see the various takes on the theme of fulfilling the measure of our creation. Serious thought was given to the question, “What was I created for?” Everyone involved did such a beautiful job.
Segullah: In creating your artwork, precision seems vital. And making a compelling “powerful whole out of many” is obviously among your skills. Can you tell us about how you developed the style of work you now do? Were there other experimental stages—any more figurative?—that appealed to you?
Paige: I began painting quilt patterns during my struggle to create a visual language to express ideas embedded in family history and genealogical work––ideas of succession, inheritance, and diligence. I began by painting chairs because they seemed like good stand-ins for people (both have arms, legs, seats, and backs) but could be abstract enough to not be about a specific person.
I quickly found through critiques, however, that it was still too literal to keep people’s minds on the ideas I was trying to convey.
Concurrent with this language-creating endeavor, I was also making an installation piece where I wanted to physically represent each of my known ancestors (I ended up capping the project at 20 generations. Turns out more records have been found than I had any clue about!) I made a beeswax hexagon for each known ancestor and wrote their name and birth/death year on it if it was known. I strung them in generational rows, leaving a gap for the holes in my pedigree chart.
I also made an audio recording of me speaking each of their names aloud, subbing in the words, “unknown name” for any person missing in my family line until there became more unknown names than known names. This practice, along with the visual epiphany while visiting my quilt-making grandma that families are simply patterns. And uncovering what we have inherited is a process of reclaiming a pattern that has been laid down, but lost or forgotten. My interest in work whose process of creation lends to its meaning gave me the nudge I needed to be bold in the studio. I would paint the pattern in fulI, and then cover it in paint, or sand it out with a power sander, something my peers seemed to think was a little nutty. But it allowed my studio practice to mimic the practice of genealogy work by tediously reclaiming a lost pattern and identity.
Segullah: That is seriously one of the coolest concepts I have ever heard about!
Paige: I thought as a college student that the style I created for my show would subside, and I’d want to paint landscapes or still lifes again. Little did I know that the visual language I created for myself would serve as a visual language and lived metaphor for the domestic life I found myself in quite suddenly at the age of 22, when I first became a mother. As I have lived primarily in the role of homemaker and mother for the past 13+ years, I have often struggled to feel like I am particularly well suited to the tasks I am largely involved in. I never have enough patience. I am too fussy about cleanliness. I am constantly stretched by creative impulses and constraints of “what needs to be done.” When asking my husband for advice about how to handle an issue with a child, his thoughtful, compassionate, and effective ideas often make me think he would be the better at-home parent. His ability to leave housework for later in favor of leaning into a spontaneous game or happy moment––and my inability to feel at ease when there is something to be done––is cause for envy and admiration. “You’re hired!” I’d say to him after he offers a particularly elegant solution.
I have sometimes struggled to find meaning in the perpetually undone and needs-to-be-redone tasks of feeding, clothing, and cleaning young children. There have been seasons where I have yearned for more intellectual stimulation, for creative freedom, for the counters to stay clean and the floors to stay unsticky, giving my brain room to roam the foothills of new and old ideas.
There’s a small book I am particularly fond of written by Catholic poet, Kathleen Norris. Even just the title, “The Liturgy of Laundry” gives me a thrill of yes. It marries the mysticism I crave with the mundanity of my present reality. I am slowly learning to find what I crave in the days that I have ahead of me. My art helps me do this. It shows me how small tasks that feel mundane or insignificant on their own, stack up to create beauty and meaning. I think my art practice has given me peace in the face of a life that is plagued by so much entropy. It’s the way God designed it, and my participation in it is turning me into something significant and beautiful.
Segullah: How do you balance precision/craftsmanship/exactness with the robust creativity and the vibrant grandeur your pieces exude? No “yes or no” answers for that one, eh?
Paige: First of all, thanks! Lovely to hear my work described that way.
I have found truth in an inherent paradox about my work that precision allows for more play as unnecessary distraction is edited out. With straight lines and tidy shapes, the focus can be on how colors and textures are interacting, how the composition slowly builds and undulates, and how your eye is carried around the canvas.
Segullah: Take us through the process of creating one of your pieces. How labor-intensive are your pieces? Have you discovered particular products or brands (of paint/paper/glue/brushes/pencils, etc.) you prefer to work with? Do you have a dedicated workspace? Or a studio? Can you describe that for us?
Paige: My work is pretty labor intensive, and I like it that way (again: see parallels to motherhood and domestic life). It lends to its heft and meaning.
I used to begin nearly all of my pieces with my kids. It would buy me time in the studio to hand a big panel to them and give them permission to go crazy. After they laid down various kid marks, colors, textures, and gloopy blobs (which I would try to get to smooth out a bit before it dried…those big blobs gum up my power sander) and it was dry, I would lay in an abstract painting on top. General colors often guide my final composition or act as a good contrasting underpainting that lends the piece depth later in the process.
After that layer is dry, I get out my trusty yardstick (and sometimes compass if I’m doing a pattern with circles) and lay the whole pattern in with pencil on top of the already-building layers of paint. Once the pattern is sketched out, I take it to the easel where I begin taping off the shapes I’m going to paint. Then I paint the pattern in, and move tape and retape and paint and tape and paint. Each shape gets at least two layers of different colors of paint, so I guess I am really painting the pattern in a couple of times.
Once that is done, I take it outside and give it a good once-over with my power sander. This is one of my favorite parts. The colors and textures of the underlayers come through, revealing beautiful and sometimes unexpected juxtapositions. There are always surprises in this phase. It also, once again, feels very parallel to daily living. We do a lot of groundwork—most of life perhaps—preparing for the “sanding down” seasons. While not pleasant, it often reveals so much about ourselves, brings out unexpected beauty, and gives our stories texture, variety, uniqueness, and depth.
After that, it’s back to the easel where I go through and paint the pattern again, this time skipping over shapes that are “working” i.e. lending to the overall composition, giving a cool pop of color, helping move the eye around, have a fun play of colors or textures, etc.
Then I sand it again.
Then I paint again, going back and forth between these processes until it feels finished (which is subjective and I always get the question, “How do you know it’s finished?” to which I say, “I don’t! Ha!”
Segullah: You do all this at your house?
I have a studio in our home. A wall was taken down between two bedrooms so I have a large space with great northern light and enough room for my projects and my kids’ projects to mostly coexist peacefully.
I remember before becoming a mother and artist, being asked what I wanted my life to look like. I said that I wanted to someday have a studio space with a big table where my kids could come and make things or work on homework while I painted in parallel. That’s what I have.
Having a studio in my home allows me to bounce back and forth between home tasks and work tasks, steal a few minutes while the kids are playing or the dinner is cooking to push a painting forward a bit. It gives my girls a good idea of what I do and also allows them the opportunity to participate and co-create with me.
Segullah: When you launch into a new project, is that because you have been commissioned to create something? Because you have an interior question that can’t be answered until your hands and eyes and soul get busy looking for an answer? Is it an intellectual challenge or question? Or something more ephemeral that you tame or try to capture?
Paige: Sometimes yes to all of those things. Some commissions start with paint swatches and a panel dimension. Some start with a line of poetry. Many of my series that I create for a solo exhibition start with questions or themes I can’t get off my mind. I feel like every painting is a bit of an intellectual and visual challenge solved in tandem. I am often trying to make sense of routine, mundanity, and daily living. It’s an ongoing quest to make meaning out of the quotidian. It gives me peace and clarity to understand my life this way.
Segullah: Is there anything about your Latter-day Saint affiliation or background that particularly influences how you create your work—or live your life, for that matter?
Paige: Yes totally! Giving meaning to motherhood and exploring the significance of genealogy are definitely LDS influences. There is definitely an LDS work ethic I think I’ve inherited. My worldview and belief that we are slowly being refined into more beautiful beings is, I feel, an LDS inheritance. So much of what I make has a spiritual bent––exploring how small things create miracles, the experience of prayer as doing the same thing 10,000 times before getting to experience a sort of “aha” as you back away and take in the whole, seeing my spiritual life as a series of small efforts—gaining testimony, community building, and discipleship in general.
Segullah: What about the practical demands of the art you create? Is it a constant joy to cut very precise bits and have them match up to your satisfaction? Have there been any tales of woe in creating any of your artworks? A gust of wind blowing away the pieces? A substrate warping? Sizing shrinking in unexpected ways?
Paige: It is definitely not constant joy. It is still work. It can be extremely tedious. Laying in the initial layers of a large piece always feels like a slog. I’ve heard people say on several occasions, not knowing the artist was behind them, something to the effect of, “Triangles? I could do that.” and I just want to respond, “Probably you could, but you likely don’t have the neural defect that would make this tedium even remotely appealing.” Because I am so free with my kids in my studio and participating in the early stages of my painting process, I have had several experiences of a little one taking a paintbrush to a nearly finished painting. Luckily my process is forgiving (look! another life parallel!), but it was definitely discouraging to have to take 2 steps backward to finish it up. I once delivered a body of work to the gallery for a solo show and when I got there for the opening I saw a piece under the gallery lights and saw that someone had scribbled pencil all over the bottom few inches of a dark part of the painting. It made me laugh as I licked my thumb and wiped it out. There are signs of my children all over my work.
Segullah: Can you share experiences about promoting your work, finding an agent (if you did), and maturing into the “business of art” as well as the practice?
Paige: Weeks after having my second baby and moving to Salt Lake, I was contacted by a friend of my previous landlord. We had recently moved from the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Washington D.C., and in exchange for reduced rent, I was supposed to have been babysitting our landlord’s kids on a regular basis. Their travel schedule meant that I helped out less than I felt was fair, so I left them with a little painting as a thank you and to ease my conscience. While visiting her friend (my previous landlord) this friend saw my painting and fell in love. She had a cool collection of art, and owned Kershisniks, and paintings by cool BYU professors I admired. Her home was in Orem, but she was in Salt Lake for an appointment and called me completely out of the blue, asking if she could come over and see my studio.
My “studio” at the time was my kitchen table and the small balcony of our apartment. I also wasn’t making much art since I was weeks into my gig as a parent of two, but agreed to have her over and show her the watercolors I had been making. She stayed for hours, complimented my previous work and the direction I was going, comparing me to artists I admired, inviting me to be part of a show she curated each year, telling me that we come from a tradition of strong women in Zion helping each other reach our dreams. After she left I just stared at my husband like, “What just happened?”
A few months later I gathered my old paintings from my final show at BYU and the couple of new ones I had made in the interim and she hung them at a restaurant, Communal, in Provo where we had a small opening and the work stayed for a few months. It was during this time that Susan Meyer of Meyer Gallery in Park City was set to speak at a monthly gathering of creatives in Provo. I reached out, asking to meet up after her talk so I could introduce myself. She agreed to meet at a restaurant to get acquainted (my choice, Communal, of course) but didn’t want to talk representation since many had reached out and she didn’t really have the time/space/interest to take on new artists.
No matter, I thought. I just wanted to talk. When we got to the restaurant after her talk, she took one look around the restaurant, asked, “Are these yours?” and when I said yes, responded with, “You’re in.” Over the course of the meal, (her treat, it turned into a “business expense”) she asked how much work I made in a year (I had no idea. I had a 5-month-old baby and a 2-year-old and a husband starting at Goldman Sachs), how much my work sells for (again, not much of a clue, I had basically only sold paintings to family and friends). That night was a pivotal one, and Susan has become one of my most treasured mentors and champions.
Nothing made me more productive than having some expectations (show deadlines! new clients!) placed on me. I began painting nearly every day. Even if it was just during a too-short nap, I made it a consistent practice to get studio time in every day. It has become the foundation of my artistic career.
Segullah: Do you have words of wisdom or encouragement for other creative women—young or old?
Paige: Just start making. Do it in the cracks of your life. Do it with what you have. I started selling little watercolors to pay for supplies to make the larger paintings I aspired to make. Don’t wait to be inspired. Inspiration comes through the doing. Find inspiration in unlikely places. That alone is a creative act. Allow yourself to live out your creativity in the regular rhythm of your life (preparing meals, prepping a home for visitors, weeding) these can all be creative expressions and practices.
Segullah: Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and talents with us! Your approach to sanctifying tedium is a valuable life lesson in so many ways!
