Kaysville Art Club marks 75 years

KAYSVILLE — It's the second Monday in October. Fifteen women are gathered in a 1920s-era home near downtown Kaysville.

Lunch smells divine, thanks to Lauri Storey, who runs a catering business.

Throughout her home, tiny groups of women ages 45 to 85 catch up and socialize and reminisce about the days when their group was young, about their mothers and grandmothers who were early members, and about their ever-expanding knowledge of art.

For 75 years, an intimate group of women in Kaysville has been gathering monthly as the Kaysville Art Club, one of the oldest such clubs in Utah.

The club keeps a low profile but awards a $500 scholarship each year to a Davis High School student.

Each month, except during the summer, the group meets with Utah artists to learn about their skills and their work.

Monday, for a special 75th anniversary, they honored the artist who started their group in 1934: LeConte Stewart. They did it because they aren't getting any younger and want to make sure Stewart's stories live on.

"It's quite something for an art club to be going strong after all these years," says this year's president, Shanna Page.

Utah's youthful and non-artistic population has likely never heard of Stewart, who was born in 1891 in Sevier County and taught art for 15 years at Ogden High School before being named chairman of the art department at the University of Utah in 1938, a position he held for 18 years.

Stewart's murals grace the walls inside temples of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Hawaii; Arizona; and Alberta, Canada, and he is considered to be one of the most influential artists from Utah.

His landscapes freeze in time the once-rural parts of Davis, Weber and Morgan counties.

Storey, a docent at the LDS Church's Museum of Church History and Art, presented Stewart's work to the club Monday and said one of Stewart's mantras was "Nature isn't perfect." He was willing to move a tree or a barn in his paintings to make better art.

"Art is an expression of a sense of a thing, rather than a reproduction of it," she said, quoting Stewart.

Stewart died in 1990 at the age of 99, but a niece, Alice Gailey Telford, and great-niece Mary Lynne Morgan belong to the club Stewart started all those years ago.

He wouldn't be very happy to see Davis County, which has grown up from rural to suburban in the past two decades, Telford said.

"I have a love affair with barns," he was quoted as saying.

And those barns now seem to be increasingly rare commodities.

But he would likely be happy that the club he started in his studio still exists and that passion for art lives on in Kaysville.

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