Starting college, she wanted to be a doctor, but after a few months she happened to be in the Art Department, and the artworks she saw displayed in the hallway there changed everything: "I found the passion that I was missing. That day I changed my major to Art, and I've never looked back."  The remarkable thing about Chelsea Bentley is that she is this good so fast-she's still a student at the University of Utah.

      "For subjects in my paintings," she told Art Talk, "I like to choose objects that evoke childhood memories, or that create situations of atmospheric mystery, or that bring visual interest through interaction." Thus a loaf of bread that might be mistaken for the work of an Old Master except for the cellophane wrapper, and everyday objects that somehow seem infused with their own unique souls.

      Bentley says, "The hand must obey the spirit," and her own obedient hand reveals a large and generous spirit: through her Delta Gamma chapter, she raised donations for Service for Sight, a nationwide program that benefits the blind and visually impaired; during two Christmases, she traveled to orphanages in Mexico, "to sub for Santa"; and she, along with her mother, joined health-care professionals in an "Alliance for Africa" expedition to Senegal, where Chelsea put her artistry to work for education, painting murals of maps on school walls. She'll be going back to Senegal this December where she will be going in Art, meanwhile, is anyone's guess, but it's bound to be up, and rather rapidly, because Chelsea Bentley is most definitly an artist worth watching.