My Life in Art

BYU Studies

Volume 59:3 (2020) - My father, Ted Bushman, was an artist. He worked his way through BYU in the 1920s painting signs and drawing cartoons. Before he graduated, he worked as a fashion artist in Los Angeles for a short time. After he married my mother, he made his living as a freelance artist for Salt Lake department stores, especially Auerbach’s. When work dried up during the Depression, he took a position at Meier & Frank in Portland, Oregon, as a fashion artist for the store’s multipage newspaper ads. Gradually, he migrated to the management side and eventually took a position with an ad agency in Portland where he handled the Pendleton Woolen Mills account. In 1950, our family moved back to Salt Lake City for Dad to work at ZCMI as head of their advertising and public relations department.

His real life in art began after he retired from ZCMI. He almost immediately took lessons and began to paint. It was as if a dam had broken. He painted continually, first oils and acrylics and then watercolors. Wherever he went, he took pictures and then painted in his studio—a few still lifes, but mostly landscapes and seascapes. He was always working on two or three canvases. We have more than a dozen of his paintings on our walls, and my brother and sister even more. Our grandchildren have Ted Bushmans too, sharing in the extensive legacy of his art. As I write, I look up at a New England fishing vessel coming out of blue mist and above it a brown-toned watercolor sketch of a Western cabin against a clouded sky. He may not have finished the cabin—it has no signature on it, which he added only when a work was complete. But I like his unfinished work as well as the signed pieces.