Dewey Monson was born in Salt Lake City. His parents moved to Los Angeles where they lived until he was about five years old. Except for nine years in western Montana in his thirties, he has lived most of his sixty-one years in Utah.

During his childhood years, he lived in a variety of places, including a one room shack built of scrap lumber, an army surplus tent, a boxcar made into a house, a foster home, a room built by tacking flattened cardboard boxes to a wooden frame, and a house being built, again, with scrap lumber, while the family was living in it.

Forty-five jobs, a lifetime of hardscrabble living, and a voracious appetite for books of all kinds, has given him a richness of experience, and a philosophical turn of mind. These things have influenced his art, made it deeper and more contemplative.

His schooling was the usual twelve grades, despite which he came out educated, due to the wide range of reading that began in the third grade and never abated.

Three years of art in high school, college classes in art history, art appreciation, and charcoal drawing were his formal training. All the rest is self taught, as much by a study of the masters, as by trial and error. As he says, "You learn by doing, more than anything else."

He was attracted to oil paint by its almost limitless variety of techniques, and by the rich textures of an oil painted surface. It has always been his preferred medium. Over the years he has developed a technique that comprises two layers of paint, each using an oil medium he mixes himself, and finishing with a layer using a readymade oil medium that fits all of his exacting criteria.

Mr. Monson does the more traditional landscapes and still lifes. He also paints large moderns done in quite a number of styles, from totally abstract, to designs that include scenery and objects. One large work, for example, includes a man, a nebula, a cityscape, a seascape, and two I beams constructed in three dimensions and bolted together.

He is inspired by his reading, especially poetry, history, and philosophy. He is also driven to create by the intense enjoyment he gets from classical music, especially the romantics and the impressionists.

He has shown in several mall art shows, state and county fairs, and at the Tivoli Gallery in Salt Lake City. Along the way he has garnered two honorable mention ribbons, one second prize, and two first prize ribbons.

In his art, he wants to express the harmony and the heartache that are integral parts of human life, the driving search for creative self fulfillment that all to often eludes us. But each work must have a beauty that transcends any 'message' that it might convey to the viewer. The philosophy is in the mind of the beholder.