Lynn Cozzens is a name to remember - a rising star in the local and state visual art scene.
"Cozzens' paintings are something you can feel," says Rebecca Mann, owner of the Rock Barn Gallery in Farmington. "They have so much power, and the colors are not put down with hesitation. I will always have a few of his paintings."When painting landscapes, Cozzens prefers the "plein-air" method - setting up his easel in fields and woods and completing the painting on location.
Sometimes he calls farmers seeking permission to use their fields. "If there are cows in the field, they form a semicircle around me. I can feel them breathing on my shoulder, and I hope that they don't step on my paint box."
When a grasshopper landed on his palette, he pushed it off, but when gnats and ants show up, he just paints them into the picture.
"Kids stop and ask what I'm doing. Critics stop and say, `That's not the color of that tree; if I were painting it, I wouldn't use that color.' "
After Cozzens works on a painting he just lets it sit. Initially, he might be disappointed in it. However, after it sits a while, he often discovers that it "works."
Painting comes naturally to him; it is part of his heritage. His great-grandfather, Orson Campbell, was an early Utah art professor and a well-known painter. Even though his great-grandfather died before Cozzens was born, he was a great influence on his painting.
"All my relatives had his paintings in their homes and I liked looking at them . . . real close. I like seeing how one brush stroke blended into another," he said.
Cozzens says he has been compared to the late Kaysville artist LeConte Stewart, a noted landscape painter. But he says he "just paints . . . I consider it a compliment to be considered like Stewart. I greatly admire his work. But it always surprises me when I am compared to him because I just put down the paint by how I feel."
The painter considers himself a Bountiful native. "I was really born in Salt Lake, but my parents moved to Bountiful when I was a short person." He attended Viewmont High School, where he saw his first Stewart painting.
"I didn't know who he was but I thought it was a good painting."
His grandmother bought him an acrylic paint set when he was younger, but he didn't like acrylics because they dried too fast. He tried watercolors and pastels, but oils are "his thing."
Cozzens attended the University of Utah, where he "played around with archaeology and ceramics."
He still occasionally digs up clay somewhere to make an Indian-style pot, then fires the old Fremont pot in a wood fire in his back yard. "It is left over from my study of archaeology," he said, laughing.
In 1987, he started painting "to see if I could make a living doing it. I have been working on it ever since."
He paints or draws every day, completing an average of two paintings a week. "If I can paint that many paintings, some of them have got to be good."
He finishes the paintings "one at a time" and seldom has a stack of unfinished work. But he does have unfinished ideas just waiting to be put on canvas.
Cozzens' paintings have been purchased by Salt Lake County for its new county complex, and Layton City acquired one for its museum. The Springville Gallery in Utah County not only shows his paintings, but his works are illustrated in its catalog.
He has taken first- and third-place and honorable-mention honors in the Davis County Art Competition.
"I only need a second (place) to have a complete collection," he joked.