Bryan Larsen . . . from page 1
Denys and Larsen shared a passion for the Pre-Raphaelites. "The thing we liked about them was that they really believed that anything that was worth painting was worth painting as true to life and as perfectly as possible," Larsen says. "If your theme was worth painting and it could be communicated in a painting then you could communicate it better if you were more precise in your technique. We really loved that idea and it was something no one was really doing."
Not only was no one doing it, but no one, it seemed to the two young artists, was interested in it. As Larsen relates it, Denys entered a large figurative piece (Sara was the model) in a University of Utah show. "It was flawless as far as the detail was concerned," Larsen says, "and I think he really captured this beautiful attitude in the painting. It took him six months of hard work to do it. It was prefect technically." The piece, however, was turned down by the exhibition. The pair went back later to visit the exhibit and was surprised to see what did get in and especially what won first prize -- "a metal stool with barbed wire wrapped around it and some feathers glued to it," Larsen remembers. "I think that was the first time we were really put off by the gallery scene."
If the artists' consequent attitude -- embodied in the sometimes dated pages I found in my google search -- seems "reactionary," it was a reaction to a real and personal experience. Larsen says the pair of artists felt Denys had been snubbed. "He had worked out the composition and technique, and spent hours in careful paint application and it's being completely dismissed in favor of this kind of thrown together piece that we didn't understand. We didn't like it. We kind of decided we were going to do our own thing and screw whatever was going on in art."
Looking back on it a decade later, Larsen is able to put the experience in perspective. "It was a student show in a University and lot of times you're going to a get a lot of extreme stuff in a University show because that's what students are going to do . . . It was probably a bit of a reactionary stance. We were working so hard and we felt that other artists were getting by with the least."
Larsen thinks the art scene in Salt Lake has changed a lot since then. That change is not just local. The past decade has seen a reevaluation of a lot of art that, while paramount in the nineteenth century, was pushed -- like so many aberrant gospels -- to the sidelines in the canonization of modernism. Take Adolph William Bougereau, one of Larsen’s heroes, a behemoth of 19th century Salon painting; greatly admired in his own day, he was almost completely passed over in the histories of art written in the twentieth century. But open this month’s edition of Art News and you'll find an article on Bougereau and his influence as a teacher; this is immediately followed by an article on Ai Weiwei, a Chinese, contemporary, multi-discipline artist, famous for such Dadaist acts as photographing himself dropping a Han dynasty urn. This juxtaposition of articles is a perfect example of the heterogeneous artistic discourses of the 21st century.
If the art world has changed, so has Larsen. After his wife finished her schooling, Larsen began studying Engineering at the University of Utah. He finished two years of his program when he sold his first painting. This renewed his hope that he could make a living with his art and he once again quit college. He and his wife -- an active supporter of his career, designer of his website and co-blogger on their
rationalart blog -- made a deal that Larsen could give his art career a go for five years.
Now in year three, Larsen is optimistic about his career (with the help of his San Fransisco gallery,
Quent Cordair Fine Art) and his views of art have mellowed somewhat. "I understand art is a very personal thing . . . where I was when Damon and I first started was probably a pretty young and extreme position and since then I think I've . . . maybe grown up a bit, seen a little bit more, tried a couple of different things, realized how difficult some techniques are, and recognized some values in some styles I maybe would have dismissed before."
The shifts in Larsen's thinking are small and delicate, like the brushstrokes in his paintings. His major philosophical stance hasn't changed, and the art he loves is still the same, but his eyes have been opened to new genres and techniques.
"I had a tendency to really dismiss landscape . . . that figurative painting was the only way to go," Larsen says, " . . . but I think I've come to appreciate that you really can put a lot of emotional content and skill into those genres . . . The one thing that I still really don't have a feel for is really abstract painting, although I am starting to think that because abstract painters eliminate all the realistic detail it makes the really good ones better at assembling compositions . . . I think that a lot of figurative, landscape and still life painters, if they were willing to study a lot of abstract painters, they would learn a lot about composition."
Lately, Larsen has concentrated on making a shift in his own work. His earliest pieces were big paintings that represented two to three months of work, were thematically intense and very detailed -- "every bit of the background painted in full focus."
|1| Larsen's dad was a draftsmen, when he was young he wanted to be an architect, and as you'll see in his work, he has a love for buildings, bridges and engineering. "I love the stuff so it shows up in a lot of my paintings but I started to feel that I was so caught up in the details that I was starting to lose the real focus of the theme." He started “to feel that there was something lacking . . . as far as the actual emotional content of the work . . . I was really relying on the background to tell everything about the image and the figures were just sort of incidental, they were sort of just a window into whatever the background was."
|2| He began to admire the work of Bougereau, where he saw that the central elements were fully developed while secondary parts were allowed to fade away into the background.
Consequently, Larsen has been concentrating more on his figures. A number of the works in the Rose Wagner exhibit are figure studies. Some – what Larsen calls "scholastic studies" --are simple figures in a generalized background.
|3| Others depict figures, now the dominant element in the composition, gazing away from the viewer.
|4| Most often the figures are looking at technology -- in the form of futuristic or contemporary buildings, aircraft, or, in a local touch, the glass reflections above the reflection pool of Salt Lake City's dowtown library.
|5|
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