Sunday, November 22, 2009,
By Ben Fulton, the Salt Lake Tribune
Jeff Gathered a staggering number of objects before putting brush to canvas for “Consumed”, a massive painting hanging in his Salt Lake City studio. A snowboard juts out of the painting’s bottom-left corner. Jewelry and other baubles settle at the bottom. Designer-label clothing floats up from the middle. A bottle of prescriptions pills anchored near the right, a necessary antidote to the anxiety of carrying a large credit-card balance. Next to the pills? A human leg, just one of several hidden body parts that will complete the overstuffed painting.
It would be hard for a viewer to miss the overt message of Hein’s painting, which will be on display for the exhibition “Hard Times: an Artist’s View,” on view through Dec. 15 at Park City’s Thomas Kearns McCarthey Gallery. Not only are most material objects needless, once accumulated, they distract us in a way every bit as confusing as the whirlwind array Hein assembled as the model for his work.
But Hein, 35, adds a few twists. He wants his finished painting to be as beautiful and alluring as possible. It’s important, he said, that people understand the temptation of consuming, the way it can sap personal – and eventually national- finances.
Another twist is that the body parts will be the last layer added to the painting. “They’ll be so consumed they won’t even be visible,” Hein said. “Maybe there will be a face somewhere, between the shadows and a gap.” And he has not spared his own conspicuous consumption. Included in the barrage of goods is the outline of a bicycle he purchased years ago for $1500 but has used only three times.
Hein’s “Consumed” will be one of 39 realist works collected for “Hard Times,” an exhibition that’s the brainchild of McCarthey Gallery owner Jim Demakis and Vern Swanson, director of the Springville Museum of Art. Traci Fieldsted, an art consultant who co-curated the show with Swanson, said its aim is to remind the art-going public to realism’s power adding visual and visceral context to the nation’s current economic crunch.
The exhibition puts works by younger, American West artists such as Hein alongside East Coast realist masters such as Burton Silverman, Max Ginsburg, Harvey Dinnerstein and Steven Assael. Fieldsted said the idea for the exhibition gained critical mass once Silverman agreed to have his works included. Hein said he’s tickled to have his painting hang under the same roof with work by Assael, one of his artistic heroes. “It didn’t take me long to come up with several ideas for this [exhibition] when Traci called me,” Hein said. “Listening to NPR when the whole financial crisis was unraveling was damaging to my stability. This is almost therapeutic.”
Co-Curator Swanson said the process of selecting works for the exhibition has already revealed differences in approach between artists from Western states and the more established artists from the East Coast. The author of three books on Russian art during the Soviet era, Swanson has a well-tuned eye for art’s social and economic influences. The younger artists of the West more often paint works of impending chaos or ominous signs, while East Coast painters lean towards gritty realism, he said. “There probably won’t be a riot in Utah if times get even harder,” Swanson said. “But will there be a riot in L.A. or the Bronx? Maybe that train of disaster is headed our way from the East.” The split can be seen comparing “Flux,” a painting by Utah artist Justin Taylor, with the portraits of homeless people by New York painter Max Ginsburg. Taylor’s work depicts a girl in three separate portraits, the third blurred in to abstract movement as if calling into question the economic welfare of future generations. Ginsburg’s paintings meanwhile are delivered straight. Having grown up during the Depression, when his father struggled to make ends meet and his mother helped form the Hospital Workers’ Union, Ginsburg, 78, said he finds more humanity in realistic scenes. “This exhibition is important because it’s really trying to deal with not only realism in form, but realism in content,” Ginsburg said. “I’ve always looked toward the old masters, such as Caravaggio. Unlike painters of his time who concentrated on aristocracy or religious heroes, he painted people in the street as they really were.”
