We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Dallin Orr a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Dallin thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

For the past year I’ve had the chance to design and lead a team in the production of a 25 foot stained glass skylight for the Utah State Capitol. The double-domed skylight will feature the four ecosystems of Utah surrounding a blazing sun in the center. While I have been working as a stained glass artist and designer at Holdman Studios for the past decade, this is the first time I’ve had a chance to take my own vision to finish while art directing a team of artists. While I love collaborating creatively, this skylight is unique in the ownership I feel for it. I often feel like my artistic vision must compromise with the clients vision, practicality, or other limitations. Not so with this project! This skylight has been a passion project and I am truly grateful for the opportunity to design and lead such a high-stakes public project.

Dallin, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am a 31 year old artist from Salt Lake City. I grew up in an artistic and musical family, so I never carried any concern or self-consciousness about making a living as an artist. I think that was a tremendous blessing from my parents, who were alway very supportive of my creativity.

I started working as a stained glass artist in 2015 as an intern at Holdman Studios. I soon developed great relationships there and became a central part of the artist team. While working as a glass artist, I finished my MFA in illustration at the University of Hartford in Connecticut. Illustration and fine art have become my creative outlets outside of my work at the glass studio. This dichotomy between the team-centered glass work and my self-driven painting projects has given me a well-balanced and always exciting lifestyle. I have always loved to learn new processes and methods of creating. For me, the experience of creativity is always inextricably linked to the experience of learning something new. I abhor repeating myself in my work and am always looking for new ways of working and thinking.

I think I am most proud of the diversity of work and skills I’ve built. I’ve had the chance to illustrate children’s books, create graphic novels, illustrate for magazines, paint oil paintings for gallery shows, and design and produce multimillion dollar stained glass projects. I consider myself extremely fortunate for the opportunities I’ve had. My twenties were a decade of experimenting with different kinds of artistic processes and purposes. I think this range of skills gives me the freedom to really choose my projects and processes from an inner sense of authority. That’s something I really admire in other artists – when I can see that the artist made clear decisions from their internal self rather that from external pressures or due to their own limitations. Real decisions involve sacrifice. It means that to do one thing, you cannot do another. And that’s what I strive for in my artwork – the responsibility of free will.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

We live in an unprecedented time with the development of artificial intelligence and there is plenty of noise online about how artists are affected. However, I think that the most crucial thing anyone can do to support artists is to make the simple choice to value human creativity and relationship over machine output. For me, an ugly painting from a person is infinitely more valuable than a beautiful image constructed by AI. The truth and power of this life as I see it exists between two people, and not between a person and a machine. Our culture runs the risk of being seduced into oblivion by the aesthetic ease and polish of artificial intelligence. AI as an image making tool is not a threat to human creativity. I’m sure AI will empower wonderful creative endeavors and help solve all kinds of problems. But it seems to be challenging what we truly value in our hearts as a community. So, all I hope that we continue value real people over the mere aesthetics that AI mirrors back to us.
Ok – end rant.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The most rewarding thing about being an artist for me is the sense of purpose. It gives me a foundation for interfacing with the world and negotiating an identity within it. While not everyone can or should be an artist for the same reasons not everyone can or should be an engineer, I believe that everyone is creative. And there is no greater honor than to experience your own creativity.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://dallinorr.com
• Instagram: @dallinorrart