Oil painting coming home to Utah from South African embassy

Steven Lee Adams will soon be receiving a large crate at his studio in Mapleton containing a painting he loaned to the U.S. ambassador to South Africa three years ago. His painting has been hanging in the embassy there as part of the Art in Embassies Program.

In an excerpt from a letter sent to Adams by Ambassador Donald Gips, he thanked the artist and wrote, “As I conclude my tenure as U.S. ambassador to South Africa, I want to thank you for the beautiful artwork you so generously lent to my wife, Liz, and I to display in our residence. Your piece, ‘Winter Evening’ was a gorgeous addition to our home and we have received countless compliments on it. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Art in Embassies program, an important tool for U.S. diplomacy. As Secretary Clinton said, art provides us ‘with another language of diplomacy, one that evokes our universal aspirations as human beings, our common challenges and our responsibilities for thinking through and addressing the problems that we face together.’ I am honored that we were able to showcase your work to the scores of South African, American and other international visitors we have hosted over the last three years.”

President John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie started the AIEP in 1964. The program places more than 5,000 works of art on loan in 170 U.S. embassies around the world.

“When Donald Gips and his wife came into my gallery I knew them well since they had been my customers for years,” said Mary Williams, owner of Mary Williams Fine Arts in Boulder, Colo. “He had been appointed as ambassador to South Africa and was looking for art for the embassy. They are not allowed to hang their private collection in the public areas but must choose works from museums and professional art galleries.”

“I happened to have this giant painting by Steven hanging in my gallery and they loved it. It’s an honor to be chosen to participate in the Art in Embassies Program, and Steven agreed to loan ‘Winter Evening — Timpanogos,’ ” she said. “It does mean of course that I lost a sale of an A-plus painting, but Steven and I have an unusual artist and dealer relationship after 17 years together. It’s not common for the artist and dealer to continue working together for so many years but it’s been very rewarding watching my community in Boulder embrace him and love his art.”

The ambassador chose other works of art, including photographs by Edward Curtis, but when the embassy catalogue was published Adams’s painting was chosen for the cover.

Adams was surprised when he was contacted three years ago by representatives of AIEP.

“The ambassador chose my painting because he wanted something that reflected the Rocky Mountains and the West,” Adams said. “The paintings help the ambassadors feel at home while they are living abroad and expose international visitors to American art.

“This particular painting was from a photo I took after I had finished skiing at Sundance. I was in the upper parking lot area and I saw this image at the end of the day and took out my camera that I carry everywhere for just that purpose. I’m an artist and I look for those images in nature.”

The award-winning Utah artist began his painting career at a young age after being encouraged by his family, especially his grandmother, who recognized his talent when he was in fifth grade. His art teacher at Lakeridge Jr. High encouraged him and he took art classes at BYU, but he didn’t paint full-time until he was 30 years old.

“I had married young and had four children to support,” Adams said. “After my divorce at age 30, I decided I would try and be an artist full-time. My dad, a friend, and Repartee Gallery helped me to be able to paint for nine months and have a show, which launched my career. I try to tell young people it’s not too late to do something. Being an artist can be terrifying. When you have a job you can do your work without a lot of people looking at you all the time, but when you are an artist it’s like running out into the world naked. It takes courage to put yourself out there. It’s worth it when you see people crying and telling you that your paintings touch them.”

Another painting of Mt. Timpanogos by Adams is more familiar to Utah County residents and visitors. He was commissioned to create the paintings of Mt. Timpanogos and Bridal Veil Falls that hang in the entrance of the Utah County Health and Justice Building in Provo. He was surprised to be chosen.

“It was amazing and wonderful,” he said. “I was actually shocked to be asked to do both. It took nine months to get them both done and it was a diComing into focusfficult time for me because my son Brooks had just died in an accident. It became a bittersweet experience.”

Asperger’s Syndrome Not Linked To Killings In Newtown

It has been more than a week since the massacre of 20 children, and six adults took place in Newtown, Conn. As the time has passed, and people around the world are mourning the lives lost, answers continue to be sought, and new details revealed, though many questions still remain unanswered.

Much is still unclear about the shooter, who originally was reported as Ryan Lanza, but was later apparently identified as Adam Lanza, age 20, Ryan Lanza’s younger sibling (click here for the original article by The Alternative Press), a resident of Newtown.

Adam Lanza reportedly died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after taking the other lives that day.

Ryan Lanza of Hoboken, N.J. was interviewed by police right after the shooting, and according to news sources, was released as a suspect. Reports also indicate Ryan Lanza said he has been estranged from his brother since 2010, and Adam Lanza dealt with Asperger’s syndrome, and personality disorders.

According to Wikipedia, Asperger syndrome (abbreviated as “AS,” and also known as “Asperger’s syndrome, and “Asperger disorder,” is “an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that is characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction, alongside restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. It differs from other autism spectrum disorders by its relative preservation of linguistic and cognitive development. Although not required for diagnosis, physical clumsiness and atypical (peculiar, odd) use of language are frequently reported.”

Reports in the media, especially a December 22 Associated Press article, have noted Adam Lanza rarely spoke publicly, typically wore the same outfit to school, pushed himself next to walls as other students would pass him in the hallways at school, and, even during a presentation at school, permitted his computer to speak for him, rather than presenting the material himself.

The same article alleges Adam Lanza had an obsession with computers, and was often sequestered in the family’s basement room, which was equipped with couches, a flat-screen TV, computer, and video games. A former classmate of Lanza’s in high school said Lanza once played the video game “Counter-Strike” with him, a game featuring terrorists, and counter-terrorists, and chose a military assault rifle and Glock to use during the game (a Glock 10 mm handgun, and a Bushmaster AR-15 were purportedly two of the weapons used by Lanza during the killings).

Adam Lanza’s mother, Nancy Lanza, who was reportedly the first victim of the December 14 killing spree, is said to be the registered owner of all of the weapons used by Adam Lanza in the slaughter. Reports from ABC News indicate as well, Nancy Lanza directed Adam Lanza’s steps in life in diffierent instances; a former babysitter has now come forward stating Nancy Lanza told him to never let Adam Lanza out of his sight when caring for him, requesting he not even use the bathroom when watching the boy. Hairstylists who used to cut Adam Lanza’s hair every six weeks when he was a teenager, said his mother would always accompany him on the appointments, and instruct Adam Lanza when he was permitted to move in the chair; according to the stylist, he never uttered a word, and only stared at the floor tiles as they cut his hair.

The Alternative Press interviewed Johnny Regan, a Sussex County resident, who was diagnosed as an adult with Asperger’s syndrome in 1999. Previous to that, Regan, who said he is also a cancer survivor (a blood disorder, which he is now cancer free from for seven years), was told he was “neurologically impaired,” before the Asperger’s diagnosis. However, Regan has been able to hold down a job, including having worked 17 baseball seasons at Skylands Park as a scoreboard operator. Regan is also very involved in the Sussex County NJ Sports Hall of Fame (click here for a previous article by The Alternative Press), as the group’s historian. At the recent induction dinner, he introduced one of the speakers from the podium, and spoke to many of the attendees during the evening.

Coincidentally, when The Alternative Press of Sussex County released the first article about the shooting in Newtown, Regan was a reader who reached back when a request for comment was posted on Facebook looking for comments about the tragedy, and indicated a friend of his lives in Newtown, Conn. When Regan first heard of the shooting, he said he immediately called his friend to check on his well-being, and learned his friend was safe, and, the friend’s children were as well; they were too young to attend Sandy Hook Elementary School. Click here for the story.

Of the possibility of Adam Lanza having Asperger’s syndrome, Regan commented, about the link some news outlets have attempted to make between Adam Lanza’s supposed issues with Asperger’s, and the violence committed. “It doesn’t apply to everybody.”

“The chilling fact is you don’t have to be mentally ill to be violent,” Cherney said. “There’s nothing definitive between Asperger’s, or any other disorder. It’s a myth.”

Cherney described Asperger’s syndrome as, “sustained impairment in social interaction that starts in youth. It’s one of the defining features.”

Cherney said another defining feature can be the “restricted range of activity. They [those with Asperger’s] can be acutely interested in certain subjects and goals with great intensity. Restricted focused activities are a hallmark.”

This can create disturbances, and difficulties, from work and especially in the relationship domain, in which those with Asperger’s may have difficulty interpreting non-behavioral cues, and gestures, which, in turn, can impact the development of peer relationships.

“Categorical schemes don’t try to capture reality, where intensity or spectrum can shade one into the other,” Cherney said. “This has created diagnostic disputes, and it’s not settled.”

The fourth edition of the DSM, the “DSM-IV,” was published in 1994. Of the revision of the newest manual, and, who decides what is kept, and what is axed, according to the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5 website, the planning stages for the upcoming version started in 1999; and between 2006 and 2008, the co-chairs to help bring about the revised manual were chosen, as well the task and work groups formed. Since then, field trials, and tests have taken place, and the draft put together.

The DSM-5 draft manual is scheduled for printing on December 31, and is planned for unveiling at the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco, Calif., in May 2013.

In regard to the building process of the manual, Cherney said, “They [the creators] land somewhere by consensus in the building process. It doesn’t mean everyone is in favor.”

Wikipedia notes Asperger’s syndrome was named by Hans Asperger, an Austrian pediatrician, in 1944, to describe four of his patients. The children had difficulties socializing, which Asperger called “autistic psychopathy.” Yet, he also said his patients were “little professors,” for their high intellectual abilities, and potential for achievement in their adulthoods.

Conspicuous burning personified

It’s so actual simple to beam at Jackie Siegel. She’s just addition crass reality-show housewife, Botoxed to the gills, who has somehow wandered into a cine amphitheater abaft her abandoned consumerism abaft her like a leopard-skin cape. Except that “The Queen of Versailles” about accidentally ends up assuming how this daydreaming American angel copes with bread-and-butter downturn, which is not at all well. And that reflects on all of us who lived the ample activity for the endure few decades — or who alone alternate in a association that did so — and are now, with abundant confusion, paying the price. Jackie’s just added entertainingly broken-down about it.

Lauren Greenfield’s documentary was one of the added high-profile entries at this year’s Sundance for all the accepted reasons: At its shallowest, the cine indulges a complacent hipster atheism at its arrant capacity and settings. But there’s added traveling on actuality than classist derision, and the filmmaker uses her footage to try to array out her feelings. She doesn’t absolutely succeed, but “Queen of Versailles” is still worthwhile, not because it questions all-American alms but because it prompts us to anticipate harder about what, exactly, we accept we’re advantaged to.

Jackie, a above engineer, model, and adorableness queen, is affiliated to David Siegel, three decades her chief and arch of Westgate Resorts, the better time-share vacation acreage business in the world. If the blur opens, it’s 2006 and everything’s gravy: Westgate is raking in millions signing up banal and lower-middle-class families for address shares that backpack cher account fees. (The aggregation is the lending crisis in awesome miniature.) The couple, their eight children, and endless lapdogs and different animals reside in a gated Florida abode adorned with faux-royal corrective portraits of themselves. David, who hints he had a lot to do with George W. Bush acceptable the accompaniment and the presidency, is interviewed sitting on what looks an abominable lot like a throne.

The abode is 26,000 aboveboard anxiety but Jackie says “we’re beginning out of the seams.” The alone band-aid is to body an even bigger abode — at 90,000 aboveboard feet, the better clandestine abode in America. The brace calls it Versailles, and it’s bisected completed if the cine opens. It stays that way, because the recession hits and takes Westgate’s business with it — or the apparition of a business, back everything’s congenital on absent cash.

“The Queen of Versailles” is alternately affecting and awful as it observes the Siegels advancing to grips with their new “poverty.” David works too harder to accumulate his Las Vegas building from falling into the easily of the bankers — the building’s a Freudian point of pride for him. Toward the end of the film, he just hunkers down in his abstraction and rages at his wife’s bills, his wife’s lifestyle, his wife. To him, she’s just addition bays that has absent its bazaar value.

Greenfield acutely feels for Jackie while aggravating to blur her from an afraid distance, and the movie’s affairs appropriately get crossed: We faculty there’s a added acutely analytical account that we’re not seeing. It’s both amusing and affecting to see this modern-day Marie Antoinette go on yet addition arcade affair or cavern in to renting a car instead of a limo and again ask the Hertz guy, “Where’s my driver?” Yet “Queen of Versailles” is abandoned amid benevolence and censure, and I’m not abiding whether Jackie Siegel deserves our sympathy.

On the added hand, the Siegels do represent a tellingly acute adaptation of our ability to buy being and achievement it will ample the blank inside. The a lot of scathingly self-aware comments in the blur appear from 16-year-old Jonquil, a niece rescued by the Siegels from a afflicted family. She has gone from dirt-floor abjection to a abode area every kid has a Segway yet the pet cadger dies because no one bothers to augment it, and her amazement is complete. You can see Jonquil alive on the Siegels’ oldest biological daughter, who by the end of “The Queen of Versailles” is disturbing to accept how affairs so abundant can get you so little.