Finding His Way
By Devon Jackson
0ctober 2006
Based on the bold modernist look of his figurative paintings and the fact that he grew up near New York City, one would think that Jeffrey Hein hung out at MoMA, the Guggenheim, and the galleries of SoHo and 57th Street as a kid, then attended Pratt Institute or the Rhode Island School of Design or Yale before apprenticing himself out as an assistant to, say Julian Schnabel or David Salle, all the while honing his craft in an abandoned loft in Manhattan’s East Village or Brooklyn’s Williamsburg. After all, Hein was born and raised in New Windsor, NY, a bedroom community just up the Hudson River, and he cane of age during the art world’s heady boom years of the 1980’s and 90’s. One would think that. And one would be, forgivably, wrong.
Born in 1974 to a New York state building inspector father and a homemaker mother who raised 3 boys and 2 girls, Hein, it turns out, never made it to any of New York’s museums or galleries as a kid. He was always drawing people and he wanted to be an artist as far back as he remembers, but he never knew how, nor did his parents-who perceived artists as flighty, poor, unreliable, or all three, and who did their best to steer their son away from art and into zoology or engineering (careers that Hein did dutifully consider). He tried to take an art class in high school but was essentially scared off by a teacher he remembers as mean. He didn’t try again until 1992, when he was well into his 20’s.
“That time,” recalls Hein, “who now lives in Salt Lake City, UT, with his wife and their twins (a boy and a girl), “it felt natural.” He briefly flirted with the idea of going into illustration, thinking it more practical to become a commercial artist. “But I realized not all artists starved,” says Hein. “I could be an exception. Besides, I was always an anti-authoritarian figure anyway.”
Before he came to art, though, he came to an appreciation of life itself. At age 21, Hein was diagnosed with testicular cancer, and complications from the disease almost killed him. But like Nietzsche said, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. In Hein’s case, he went from underachieving and slightly lacking in confidence to knowing exactly what it was he wanted to do-paint- and making damn well sure he did it. “Cancer amplified everything about my personality,” assesses Hein. “It made me more intense.”
After getting thorough the cancer, Hein remembers taking a color-personality test. “I’d gone from a white personality to a flaming red,” he marvels in retrospect. “I had a completely different sense of self-worth. I don’t know if I’d be where I am now if not for cancer. Since that time, I’m extra-motivated.”
Part of his newfound motivation involved leaving the East Coast and his parents. He first went to Idaho, then to Utah-two states where relatives and friends welcomed him. “I didn’t have any money to go to art school, but I had a lot of connections out West,” says Hein, who, like most of his relatives and many of his friends are Mormon. “It was like living on the moon, though. I’d never seen so much dirt in my life.”
After a stint at BYU-Idaho (known then as Ricks College), and then another one at Salt Lake Community College, Hein finally settled in at the University of Utah. Although he never received his bachelor’s degree in fine arts, it didn’t matter. By his senior year, he was already selling some of his work. Married by then and working out of a friend’s basement, Hein transitioned from fixing things around the house into starting up his own handyman business into building cabinets and furniture on commission into painting full time. “Everything back then,” stresses Hein, “was a means to an end-the end being painting. I had a set goal.”
He’d also been given, toward the end of his junior year, a scholarship that let to his first major breakthrough. As part of a series of paintings, there was one recalls Hein, of a woman with big feet holding a can of soda. “It was just her, this single figure, with no environment at all,” says Hein. “It was very popart-ish. That was huge. I was so stoked about it. Because at that point, I was so bored of what I was doing, since they were just people and I’d had a lot of duds.”
His next breakthrough came with BETHANY, a yellow painting with three silhouettes, with Bethany, of his favorite models, in pencil. “It brought me in a different direction,” asserts Hein. “I’m now in between those two styles. But I didn’t plan it. It’s a style that just sort of happened.”
It’s a style as bright and melancholy as Wayne Thiebaud’s still lifes, as direct as the portraits of Eric Fischl and Lucian Freud, and with the fleshy hints of John Singer Sargent and Rembrant. It’s also a style that found a nurturing partner in Clayton Williams, owner of Salt Lake’s Williams Gallery. “They’ve been so good to me,” says Hein. “From the beginning, they treated me like I was much bigger than I was.”
Currently working out of a 2,000 square foot studio in Salt Lake’s business district, Hein plans to move into etchings as well, another medium that should suit his style. “I’m very organized, very analytical. It’s a sin to make a mess on canvas. Everything I do is clean and deliberate. There are no unfinished details. It’s just part of my temperament.”
Speaking of sin and temperament, it would be incomplete not to acknowledge Hein’s other paintings: his religious works. “The only reason I do these religious paintings is because they’re payback,” he confesses. “I’m very Christian, and that was a big part of getting through the cancer, and now it’s my way of giving back. And so indirectly, it has affected my art. All of it.”
It pains him some that his contemporary work tends to justify his religious work. And he’s very aware of that unspoken separation between “real” art and religious art. But he paints the religious pieces more for a higher power than for monetary reward. The paintings usually tell a story he relates to, such as his version of THE RASING OF LAZAURS-“I know what it’s like to wake up thinking you were never going to wake up again,” he says. Besides, the religious works require a different set of artistic muscles, and he’s always gone against the grain. “Everyone told me not to do everything I’ve done,” says Hein. “There’s nothing harder, though, than those religious paintings. It’s not just the subject matter, either. It’s the technique. But I learn a lot more about design by doing both the religious and the contemporary paintings.
“The only philosophy I have is design,” continues Hein, who’s drawn to bold shades of color and flat backgrounds. “I try to come up with interesting compositions while incorporating the figure. And whether it’s a figure or a field of red, it’s still a design decision. Still, it’s tough to bounce back and forth between the two. It’s almost like I have to shut off part of my brain.”
Truth be told, however, part of the reason he has stayed in Utah is because of the religious paintings. “I’m in the perfect market for them,” he admits. This despite his initial thought that he’d leave Salt Lake after a couple o years, despite the feeling he’s always had that he’s a man without a home, despite a reluctance to hang any of his paintings – his religious ones especially-in his own house.
“Sadly, that’s my goal,” confesses Hein, now 31. “To paint something that I can feel good about hanging in my own house and say, Wow, that is cool! Every now and then that happens. But usually, when I finish paintings, I can’t stand them. It’s like looking in a mirror. I can see myself. I can’t get past that it’s me.”
More and more, though, Hein’s been able to get past that feeling. Recently, he was asked to participate in this month’s U.S. Artists American Fine Art show in Philadelphia, PA. “I paint figures fairly uniquely,” he reasons. “I do it on one shot so that the paint looks fresh and clean and colorful.” He pauses. “If something’s beautiful, regardless of its content, if it’s beautiful enough, people will feel good. People will respond to it.”
