2024 GSENM Artist In Residence: Lonny Granston

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is pleased to announce that Lonny Granston has been selected as the 2024 Artist in Residence (AiR).  The Artist-in-Residence Program is sponsored by Bureau of Land Management/Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in partnership with Escalante Canyons Art Festival (ECAF) and Glen Canyon Conservancy (GCC). 

To learn more about the Artist in Residence program, visit https://www.blm.gov/get-involved/artist-in-residence/air-sites/grand-staircase-escalante-national-monument.

Park Avenue Freeze Out

Throughout his residency, Lonny will do several public/community programs and create a body of artwork to be exhibited during the festival. 

During the festival Lonny will do a demonstration Battle of the Hemispheres and an offsite Hands-on Art Up Close and Personal with the “Great White Shark Fin”.

As a portrait artist, Lonny Granston has drawn in-person images of such notables as Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, President Biden, women’s basketball star Kaitlyn Clark and ‘the half-naked guy with really dirty feet passed out on the corner of Pearl and 10th’ as well as hundreds of others who had no idea they were be drawn by some guy hiding behind a bush. 

Be sure to stop by Lonny’s AiR tent for a Pressure and Portrait where you will pose for a quick (10 minute) portrait. Your blood pressure will be measured before and after the portrait and Lonny will offer free medical advice upon request 🙂

A critic once described Lonny Granston’s work as something that the love child of Vincent Van Gogh and Georgia O’Keeffe would produce.

Laurence “Lonny” Granston started life as an artist, played doctor and triathlete for a while, then returned to his easel. He has little formal training in painting, and, as a result, has gravitated toward pastels, which are similar to the crayons he scribbled with on the walls as a child.  A multiyear participant in the Escalante Canyons Art Festival plein air events, Lonny has spent decades hiking, biking, kayaking, getting lost, and now painting in the area that now comprises Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. 

He has lived and practiced medicine the last 34 years in Boulder, Colorado.  During that tenure, he  has somehow managed to remain entirely unknown to the hospital’s medical-legal team, stayed  married to the same woman for 29 years, assisted in raising a remarkable young woman and stayed out of the criminal justice system.

Lonny is represented by Ana’s Gallery in Boulder and Osmosis Gallery in Niwot, Colorado.