You could call him the Candy Man. A fine artist who paints appealing confections with many layers of meaning, Kent Christensen sells his work at a gallery in London, at Williams Fine Art in Salt Lake City, and splits his time between a small apartment in New York City and a stunning, light-filled home he built at Sundance five years ago. Not a bad life for someone who does things like the Spiral Jetty in saltwater taffy as a 6-foot oil. He sold that to a client in Chicago but keeps a smaller version in his Utah home.

To appreciate the irony of that picture you have to make some associations. Christensen is LDS and believes sugar is “Mormon heroin” – a should-be subsidiary to strong drink and tobacco as a vice in the LDS lexicon. And he thinks the concept of vast overconsumption of sweet stuff applies to society at large – not only to Americans supersizing every Coke they order but to the current financial crisis as well. And, he says, “In the art world, when you mention Utah, people immediately think of the Spiral Jetty.” So, there’s saltwater (the “Great” Lake wherein the Jetty sits) and taffy. And “Sweet“ Candy Co. that makes the sticky stuff which is usually sold in “bulk.” It’s like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon – you can go on and on.

“Salt Water Jetty” by Kent Christensen

Christensen does like to play games with his art. He hides things in it, pays homage to other artists and different cultures, often has a darker meaning to his charming images and appreciates viewers who take the time to uncover them.

“It’s so much fun for me to watch people at gallery openings discover things that I’ve put in my paintings and . . . sort of poke at riddles that might be there. To me the work is about the communication, the light that I see on someone’s face when they get it. And you can’t get that experience if you’re explaining things away all the time. It has to be experienced in real time, the way you have to go to a play and watch something unfold in real time. I can’t tell you how great a play was and re-create the experience of sitting in the theater and watching the scenes unfold in the way the playwright and actors create that experience for you by telling you about it. You have to actually be there in person. I try to do the same thing with my work.”

But different cultures see different things in his work. Christensen recalls that in a 2007 London show, the Brits looked at his painting of green Jell-O “and said, ‘What is THAT?’ But they were the first to recognize that it’s an homage to the American minimalist, sculptor Donald Judd.|1| It’s rewarding to me as a painter when people have done their homework.”

“Number 24 Green Jell-O” by Kent Christensen

Hard to know what Londoners might think of the Pez dispensers |2| – do they even celebrate Halloween across the pond? Set against the New York skyline, the portraits are remarkable. The perfect plastic sheen on Garfield’s face, the carefully carved and shadowed trade name on their sides, the way each could be cut out to stand on its own yet works perfectly as part of the whole. That’s how Christensen thinks. “Even when I’m painting one object I’m thinking about how it would look if I did a series of them, or put them in a circle,” he says. The grins on Garfield and the snowman are comparable, Bugs and the Easter Bunny are hilarious in juxtaposition and Mickey and the witch are somehow each simultaneously evil and comic, but how does one decide what to paint when there are hundreds of images from which to select?

Turns out Christensen had accumulated quite a collection as his kids were growing up. (Wife Janet works at a financial firm in midtown Manhattan; daughter Anne, 23, works on Wall Street; Jane, a senior at Timpview High in Provo just celebrated her 18th birthday at The Leonardo, where her father has an upcoming two-week residency.)

“Sacred and Profane Pez” by Kent Christensen

The artist recalls laying out the Pez dispensers, “trying to group things together, creating relationships, and I found these six kind of went together well. Because it’s called ‘Sacred and Profane Pez,’ you have these three sacred sort of images on the left that are less commercial, a little more traditional like the Easter Bunny, and on the right the crass, louder versions, Garfield, Mickey. They started pairing up nicely in several ways.” Could they be mirror images? “Often people don’t get that until you tell them about it. That’s true of a lot of things in my work. People just sort of think it’s pretty. I think I try to make it pretty, actually, because that only plays up the underlying sinister nature of some of the work.

I started out doing pretty things for Sam Wilson up at the U. [where he got his MFA] because I had this stuff in my studio that I brought to look at, you know, to snack on while I was working [laughs], and Sam couldn’t understand why I wasn’t painting them . . . and then instead of just painting pretty things that were special, like ribbon candy,|3| I started painting ordinary things, like candy corn . . . You don’t see ribbon candy very often and when you do it’s just pretty, but everybody knows what candy corn is and now it’s everywhere all year round. You have a Christmas version and an Easter version. You can use it as a sort of prop on another level because it’s so ordinary. In my case I could make circles |4| of it or really throw you [off] a bit and make it big, larger than life.”

Christensen is an easy-going, gentle sort with a wicked sense of humor. Asked, “When did you start seeing the relationship between Mormon culture and sugar?” he deadpans, “You mean, in my work?” – then goes on to explain that it all started with that ubiquitous green punch at weddings. “I mean, what was that? It’s so unusual and of course I didn’t know it was unusual until I started attending other weddings.” He adds that the food fixation began while he was working on his first body of work at the University of Utah. “Sam [Wilson] thought it was fabulous. Going from his suggestion of painting the beautiful stuff in my studio and making the leap from that to Mormon culture and American culture and remembering the way people in New York who didn’t know Mormon culture observed my eating habits.

I wasn’t drinking beer or wine. But I was doing other things that they weren’t doing like eating éclairs, the hot chocolate in all of its many impossible flavors |5| – being an expert on things like that. I mean, when chocolate is the only thing you really do . . . People aren’t into that stuff the way a wine connoisseur is.”

He is relied upon to know where the best cannolis are in New York City. “Not just everyone has a reputation like that,” he says somewhat smugly.

“I like a view but I like to sit with my back to it” by Kent Christensen

An exceptional piece in Christensen’s Sundance home hangs by itself at the top of the stairs leading to the family’s living space. It’s a gouache of Gertrude Stein in Paris, |6| based on Picasso’s 1906 painting of the writer and collector done while Christensen was in art school at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in the mid 1980s.

”It was a wide-open class in media experimentation,” he recalls. “One of those classes that if I hadn’t taken it then the rest of my life would have been different.

That particular exercise involved drawing in ink on a piece of illustration board then painting on it in gouache, then covering that up with another layer of black ink to stain through where the gouache is covering up the surface of the board. Then wash the whole thing off and start over again. You’re just giving yourself all this information, a lot of it in random.”

He says the project was a revelation to him because he was always traditional in his style of working in oil and had never before worked in water or water-based media. “I did a whole series of paintings like that based on quotes of Gertrude Stein. They sort of symbolized my growing up as an artist. I had a couple of moments like that: My first trip to Europe in 1981 under James Christensen, my art teacher at BYU, was another. “

Everyone told him his work would change when he got to New York “because your life will change — and it did,” says Christensen. “That class showed me that I could play around with media and very quickly find another way of accomplishing a particular goal.” And he had to change mediums because he was living in a studio apartment with a baby and “couldn’t work with all this toxic stuff so I switched immediately from oil to watercolor.” He also developed his own version of working in watercolor “that mimics working in oil in richness. “ It had to.

“Rumors for the LA Times,” by Kent Christensen

“Willie Nelson for Rolling Stone,” by Kent Christensen

Another change: Christensen was creating illustrations for magazines and newspapers such as TIME, Sports Illustrated, the Los Angeles Times,|7| Rolling Stone,|8| the Wall Street Journal and more.”I always figured I would be an oil painter. But I ended up kind of honing the ability to adapt and change which is essential to being an illustrator.” Looking over his portfolio you notice that he has a recognizable style regardless of where his work is included.

“When you’re building a portfolio in art school, the tendency is to show that you can do anything and that can be a problem because you end up with a portfolio that looks like it’s done by 10 different people. And when an art director gives you 30 seconds to look at your portfolio you want it to be really tight and something he can remember. So you need some sort of style . . . And art directors do not want to be surprised. It works against you so much, too, because after awhile you start having to do a version of what you did last time. But that happens to fine artists too.”

These days, Christensen shows most of his work in England and leaves it there. It’s too expensive to ship it back and forth. There they sometimes view his art as Pop. Critic Martin Gayford, author of the recent book Man With a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud, writes: “Kent Christensen’s Hollywoodland (2008) |9| is a bit surreal and in its own way something like a collage, in that it depicts a giant soft drink, with straw, hovering above a landscape. It is an effect that could be produced through photomontage: here it is done with paint. His work is modern — or perhaps Pop – still life, concerned with sweet and mass-produced foodstuffs: Jell-O, Jordan Almonds, Oreos.”

“Sensory Overload” by Kent Christensen

At Williams he generally shows smaller pieces that aren’t quite as much appreciated by the sucrose-loving, pioneer-heritage crowd as one might expect. Tom Alder says, “Kent’s art is attractive, provocative and should sell better than it does here in Zion. Perhaps his treatments of local iconic subjects like green Jell-O (and for Ute fans, red Jell-O) are too embarrassing to a lot of clients. I asked Kent once if he tells the Londoners who purchase his paintings about the significance of green Jell-O and he said he doesn’t but after they purchase he confides in them the Mormon connotation and they like their painting even more.” Christensen’s next project likely will be a Pez Santa, which he hopes to complete in time for the Williams’ Holiday Show. It will look great in a gilt frame.

Born in 1957 and reared in Southern California, he was the proverbial surfer dude and continues to ride the waves during an annual family vacation to a beach near San Clemente, Calif. After high school he spent two years in South Korea as a missionary for the LDS church. Frequent travels “totally” influence his work. He has visited all three Scandinavian countries (a personal heritage tour), and a day bicycling and having ice cream on the dock by one of the fjords evoked the pink ice-cream cone floating over Denmark.|10| “I tried to re-create the feeling of that,” he says. A trip to Egypt (just before the recent revolution) influenced the Rollo candy “gold-leaf” background for “Sensory Overload”.|11| Eleven Fine Art, his London gallery, writes of this painting, on which they based a solo exhibition:

“[His] work has always been rooted in art history, spanning modern and classical references to inform his contemporary paintings. . . . The gilded background recalls religious icon painting and Gustav Klimt’s seductive gold decorations but in Christensen’s world, his precious ornamentation is made from candy wrappers . . . His work employs an inescapable decadence, while examining our consumerist culture, which is driven by chasing a satisfaction that can never be fulfilled.”

So take another glance at the Oreo hovering above that bee-embossed glassful of milk;|12| whatever you think you see on the surface, look deeper. Christensen’s work is rarely only sweetness and light.|13|

Kent Christensen’s work is available in Salt Lake at Williams Fine Art and in London at Eleven Fine Art. You can view more of his work at his website. Kent Christensen will be moving his Sundance studio to The Leonardo for a two-week residency from November 16-28. Check our Daily Bytes blog the week of November 14th for more information.

“Diet Coke and Classic Coke” by Kent Christensen

Ann Poore

A graduate of the University of Utah, Ann Poore is a freelance writer and editor who spent most of her career at The Salt Lake Tribune. She was the 2018 recipient of the Salt Lake City Mayor’s Artist Award in the Literary Arts.