John Erickson, “Western Space,” mixed media, 48 x 48 in. Courtesy of Phillips Gallery.

“I heard him say, ‘The bigger the brush the bigger the rush.’ ”

John Erickson presents the statement for his current show at Phillips Gallery as a conversation between his family cats, Emmaline and Cecily. Speaking of the artist’s creative struggles as they witnessed them from underfoot—endeavors that unlike rote tasks do not automatically get easier with age—Emmaline suggests, “Maybe he likes the risk … like chasing a mouse!” to which Cecily responds with the above suggestion.

It’s not the mere slogan it may sound like. Ansel Adams, whose art was almost always done en plein air, used to urge his fellow photographers to carry the largest format camera they could reasonably handle in a given locale. While the analogy isn’t perfect, these two solutions have in common that they discourage fussing with mere trivia. Emmaline, in fact, also says, “Some days he tinkers over small details.” Now it’s all well and good that in Renaissance portraits it’s possible to count the whiskers on the subject’s cheeks, but today we can stand a brisker, more all-embracing image—one in which setting, background, atmosphere, and so on compete with the subject for our attention.

Often it’s the “fussy details” that support such visuals. In “Bird Room,” a Redwing Blackbird flying past a tree has been transposed, complete with tree, background and outdoor lighting, into an interior, an effect that looks like it might be achieved by projecting a photograph of the exterior scene on the walls inside the room. Two details, a hose bib outdoors by the tree and a light switch inside on the wall, each interrupt the logic of the alternate locale. In other scenes, similar effects achieve a kind of magic, as when glass windows, complete with reflections, are interposed like ghosts between the viewer and the view.

Adding to the paradox of brush size, it’s rarely possible to tell how big an Erickson is from a photo. While he’s always shown a fair number of large works that are framed or otherwise seem to be finished, here there’s a welcome complement to them of some 50 small paintings, apparently all watercolors, each of which is on a single sheet of paper that has been secured to the gallery wall with binder clips. They’re mostly scenes of John and Barbara Erickson with their family and friends, frolicking in the wilderness, or at least the outdoors. In the past such pieces have been casually inserted in handy frames, but their wholesale display here adds a new dimension to his image as a working artist. They all show the virtue of unfussy yet sublimely competent technique, possibly done with brushes larger than the subjects conventionally call for. Instead of separating subject from environment, the large splashes of color and light they produce weld the contents into a unified whole.

Some of the 50 unframed watercolors on exhibit in John Erickson’s Phillips Gallery exhibition, including “Model and Artist” (bottom left) and “John and Camera” (bottom right). Image by Geoff Wichert.

But they never obfuscate the visual experience or confuse the eye. Anyone who’s ever shared a tour through a less skillful friend’s sketchbook, with one smeared porridge after another, will appreciate the professor who dismissed such work with “You can’t tell what’s what.” Another virtue of Erickson’s technical array is the way he reverses the voyage of content from the world into the picture by lending his graphic techniques optical significance. In picture after picture, he inverts the order of the painting process so the drawing reappears on top of the color, thereby creating a cognitive sense of form, an illusion of detail. In “Tikka on the Log,” not only is the dog’s body not solid, it isn’t present at all if the eye ventures past the nest of lines.

Aside from the candid images of his extended family in the woods, Erickson’s most personal images might be the visual expressions of his spatial explorations. Such cerebral evidence of an active mind also make it into the “unframed” collection in works like “John and Camera,” in which he is seen to be taking a photo in which the viewer of the work will become his subject: the protagonist in this drama. What a thinking person might realize in viewing it is that the photo he presumably painted this self-portrait from was taken by the actual subject of his camera, in whose place we now stand. In the same way, in an image titled “Model and Artist,” while the model poses near the center of the painting with one foot up on a chair, the artist referred to in the title is not the John Erickson who is making this painting, but a man almost lost in the background clutter, who is painting the reverse of the model’s pose. Works like these might well be called “playful,” and depending on the individual viewer, it may make sense to spend at least a portion of time spent with any Erickson painting alert for similar discoveries.

John Erickson, “Emalie,” mixed media, 24×18 in. Courtesy of Phillips Gallery.

Finally, this tour of John Erickson’s life through his art brings us back to where we began: to Emmaline the cat … or “Emaline” or “Emalie”—evidently, the universal mutability of cats’ names, a phenomenon well known to their human companions, is at work here. Anyway, the cat has three variously transparent body segments to go with her three purposes: to display some of the vast range of marks that artists have at their disposal; to show how those marks function in the work of our eyes and minds to aid in comprehending and conveying the physical properties of a subject; to remind us how a competent artist can show us something more vividly than we can see it in person. Feel free to connect with the mind of this cat and experience it as though directly.

That last point must not be trivialized. Erickson shows us so much more of what’s going on behind the veil, the curtain, the conventional surface of the art, in the trained mind and practiced hand of the artist. But we never want to stop there. Show me how you see the world, yes, but never forget it’s that world I want and need to see.   

John Erickson, Phillips Gallery, Salt Lake City, through March 15

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.