It was after she was naked to herself in her studio, after she really began looking artistically at her own body, that Clinger began to reach a new level in her painting.

"I had had these rumblings for years," Clinger said, ideas about the female body as metaphor, some sense of the feminine as divine. But things began breaking open artistically when and Clinger and her husband tried to have children and her body just wouldn't comply. "You're in a body, and it's not cooperating" - so what are you going to do? Clinger asks.

A comprehensive show of Clinger's work - including pieces addressing the complex and personal legacy of the female body - opened this week at the University of Utah Museum of Fine Arts. In the exhibit, Clinger displays her prowess at the formality of the commissioned works and the wild exploration of psyche in her self portraits.

Clinger, a sixth-generation Utahn now in her mid-50s, might seem young for a retrospective exhibition. Most artists are in their 70s or 80s when they're asked to exhibit their opus, causing themselves, and viewers, to reflect.

But Clinger's show looks at the directions the artist has taken in the first half of her life, the artistic productions of her reproductive years.

The painter is descended from a long line of strong southern Utah women. Her maternal grandmother was a Cedar City school teacher who rebelled against the notion that only unmarried women could teach school. Clinger's mother was an elementary school art teacher.

The artist recalls regular visits to museums in her childhood, and that her family home in Salt Lake City's Beacon Heights neighborhood was filled with art books.

She was influenced by other important mentors, too, including her art teacher at Highland High School. Later at the University of Utah, she struggled until she received the attention of influential art professor Alvin Gittins.

"I can still hear his voice," Clinger said of Gittins. Not just his British accent, but the sometimes devastingly ruthless quality of what it was he said.

Gittins told his classes that he never gave As. If you were awarded one, you were so good you wouldn't have to worry about money. If you got a B, that meant you'd have to work hard to have an artistic life.

And if you received a C, "you'd have to teach." The most horrible fate imaginable, her teacher implied.

Gittins' pronouncement made her angry, Clinger says, but so did the suggestion she heard from others at the U. that, as a woman, she ought to be putting down her paint brushes and picking up a baby bottle.

Still, she admired Gittins, and desperately sought his approval. She worked hard to receive an A from the professor, and finally she did.

The years studying with Gittins weren't smooth, but were rewarding. After he had accepted her as a legitimate artist, Gittins' critiques of Clinger's work never rattled her. Rather, she thrived on his responses. "Can you see the cool in the flesh here?" he would ask, and in looking through Gittins' eyes, Clinger learned to develop her own literal and artistic visions.

"All my mentors were men," Clinger says of her early art teachers. The expectation that female artists couldn't be as good as men never stopped her from pushing through personal or artistic walls.

Her influences, she says, have always been Jungian, feminist, and spiritual in nature, and her work - particularly the self-portraits - reflect that.

Whether consciously or not, Clinger believes most people, men and women alike, share a terror of womens' bodies. "We tend to reject them," she understates.

But Clinger has been determined to address that notion. She believes it's an artist's job to push through a set of images and in surrendering to them, be reborn spiritually and artistically.

That's what Clinger intends to keep doing in the second half of her life.

Clinger at UMFA

"An Innermost Journey: The Art of Shauna Cook Clinger" is on exhibit through Feb.15 at the University of Utah Museum of Fine Arts, 410 Campus Center Dr., Salt Lake City; 801-585-7051; www.umfa. utah.edu. for information. Hours: Tuesdays-Fridays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Wednesday 10 a.m.-8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Closed Mondays and holidays; Tickets are $5 ($3 seniors/youth); children under 6 and U. students/staff free.

» Shauna Cook Clinger will offer an artist talk at Nov. 15 at 2 p.m. in the museum auditorium. In addition, Margaret Toscano, U. Classics professor, will present a lecture "Images of the Female Body - Human and Divine" Nov. 19 at 7 p.m. in the auditorium. Both are free with museum admission.