There are some artists who "feel that if you don't put great angst into your paintings, you are not serving art. I don't buy that. My contribution is to try to encourage people to be happy, to enjoy life, to be positive."

He knows a man who hangs a Christensen painting in his bathroom. "He told me that every time he gets out of the shower, he sees it and it makes him laugh. I say good for him!"

Some of Christensen's artwork hangs in his own Orem home. "Carole gets to pick one painting a year to keep. That was her deal way back when I was just starting to get successful. I've also saved a couple that particularly inspire me, and things that don't sell have a way of dribbling back."

Christensen taught at Brigham Young University for 20 years but has since "quit my day job." Over the course of his career, he has been accorded numerous honors and awards. He was recently designated as a Utah Art Treasure, one of Utah's Top 100 Artists by the Springville Museum of Art and received the Governor's Award for Art from the Utah Arts Council.

He has won all the professional art honors the World Science Fiction Convention gives out and has received multiple Chesley Awards from the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists.

"Men and Angels" is the latest of several books he has produced, including "A Journey of the Imagination: The Art of James Christensen," "Voyage of the Basset," "Rhymes & Reasons," "Parables" (written by Robert Millet), as well as a series of interactive journals — all filled with art that Greenwich Workshop notes is "born from his keen observation of humanity and his endless supply of imagination."

Christensen just "feels fortunate I get to work at a thing I love to do. The more I discover about the world, from biology to art history, the more enthralled I am with the magic that is human existence."

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E-MAIL: carma@desnews.com