This LDS artist is tackling bold themes with bold colors

Woodland Hills • From her tidy, meticulous Utah County studio, Latter-day Saint artist Rose Datoc Dall transports viewers to an unassuming stable in Bethlehem, a workaday wood shop in Nazareth, the surging gusts of Galilee and the dusty streets of Jerusalem.

“I kind of feel like that’s what I’m here to do,” Dall says, “to paint the life of Jesus.”

Dall does so by combining contemporary art techniques, fused from film, with scriptural stories, filled with faith.

“Rose is one of the most important artists working in religious art in Utah right now,” says Emily Larsen, Springville Museum of Art’s executive director. “Her work is really unique and has a really unique point of view. She’s technically masterful.”

Dall draws in her audiences, Larsen explains, through realism, painting lots of flat planes of color that give her work a “graphic quality.”

For her part, Dall, who nearly became a moviemaker, visualizes her paintings through a cinematographer’s eye.

“You plan your shots. You plan your compositions,” Dall says. “It’s like in storyboarding. That really appealed to the way my brain works.”

Early on, she focused on more secular themes. But the reception her religious art received changed her career trajectory.

In 2008, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Church History Museum hosted an international art competition. Dall decided to participate and painted one of her signature pieces “Flight,” a biblical depiction of Mary and Joseph taking the infant Jesus to Egypt.

The painting won raves and her new artistic direction took off.

“A lot of things came together,” Dall says. “I could sort of marry contemporary art sensibilities with religious subject matter. … This is sort of the painting that launched my career.”

Mixing the old with the new

This blend of contemporary technique with ancient scripture led Dall to a distinct style.

She often employs bold shapes and contrasting colors (she calls them “sunrise” and “sunset” colors) to highlight certain details and figures in her work.

In “Bread of Life (Command These Stones),” since purchased by the Springville Museum of Art, this contrast is vibrantly visible. The piece, which depicts Satan tempting a fasting Christ to turn stones into bread, shows a darker, blue hue around the subjects, with a bright stunning yellow in the background.

Some don’t take to her style — and Dall says she’s fine with that. “I’m OK if people don’t relate to my paintings. That’s what happens.”

After all, she says, art is all about personal interpretation and connection. And Dall herself didn’t feel that connection to one of her own works.

She painted “Woman of Faith,” a New Testament portrayal of a woman with an issue of blood, about five times but says she never quite appreciated her subject.

Until Dall got cancer.

“I love this image because she could be us at any given time,” the Filipina American artist says. “I felt like that woman. Do I have the faith to be healed? Or do I have the faith not to be healed?”

Dall has fully recovered and says she understands better now how her art can help people of faith.

“Most people are on the edge of crisis,” Dall says. “I feel like the more personal I make these paintings, the more universal they end up being.”

Prepping for each painting

Dall spends copious amounts of time prepping each painting even before her first brushstroke.

First, she storyboards each painting. She also photographs models to study the facial expressions and angles. Then come the maquettes, small-scale models that serve as visual aids. Dall’s maquettes, often clay figures, are modeled in the correct shape and lighting for the final product. And after all of this, Dall’s paint finally makes it to canvas.

“There’s a lot of research that goes on … conceptualizing, visualizing the layout,” says her husband, Tim Dall. “And when she does religious art, she wants it to be historically accurate.”

To that end, she portrays Jesus with authentic Semitic features.

Dall explains that she first painted Christ in this style back in 2020 and posted an image on Instagram.

“I kind of took this risk,” Dall says. “I put it out there … and didn’t know how people would respond.”

Viewers embraced it.

Depicting Heavenly Mother

In another bold move, Dall was commissioned to paint Heavenly Mother for the 2020 book “A Boy’s Guide to Heavenly Mother.”

Latter-day Saints believe Father in Heaven has a wife, a Mother in Heaven. While the doctrine is more openly taught today, it can be a touchy topic, even among the faithful.

“This was a real struggle,” Dall says. “At first I was going to paint her by herself, but then I just felt stuck. I was like, ‘What am I trying to say? I have so little information on her.’”

She finally decided to paint what she did know, depicting the divine couple as creators of the universe in a piece titled “Worlds Without Number.”

The response proved electric. Another of her Heavenly Mother paintings, “The Veil Is Beginning to Burst,” has outsold all of her other works.

“I kept getting orders and orders of this image,” Dall says. “And, for whatever reason, women really responded to this. The acknowledgment of Heavenly Mother means that it further validates your own divine nature and your own worth.”

And Dall’s worth as an artist continues to rise.

Note to readers • Dylan Eubank is a Report for America corps member covering faith in Utah County for The Salt Lake Tribune. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories.