Nolan Flynn’s exhibition of work at Harrington Art Studio. Image courtesy of Harrington Art Studio.

A painter, part-time high school art teacher, and fellow writer for 15 Bytes, Nolan Flynn is showcasing his spectrum of play at Harrington Art Studios in Midvale with a pairing of large and small works. The two styles are striking together, one working to prove technical prowess and the other a testament to the power and success of play. Hung together, they provoke a question: in the act of making art, what do we have to prove, besides our own pleasure in the making?

Harrington Art Studios (HAS), tucked in a post-industrial zone of Midvale, sets the stage for Flynn’s inquiry. The space is run by artist and custom framer Ryan Harrington, and his wife, Cassidy. It exudes a gritty charm. The walk-up has a quaint front showroom, with a wall of frame samples facing the gallery walls. The space overflows into the back warehouse-turned-workshop for the framing business where local artists and the influence of Harrington’s skate background abound on the walls.

Flynn’s larger pieces, “Night Hike,” and “Cottonwood Plan,” are what the artist calls “naive Photoshop activity collages”—crude digital collages splicing and scrambling photos of the Mountain West into disjointed fragments that somehow retain a sense of familiarity. The works are painted and airbrushed on a canvas in icy palettes of blue and gray, with sudden flashes of red, orange, and yellow—colors that will be familiar to anyone who spends time in the Wasatch. Their frenetic quality simulates the whooshing of speed at which descending mountain slopes make everything a blur—disorienting, almost like a crash, like broken vision.

The interplay of mediums is one of the most intriguing aspects of these larger works. The airbrush on these is reminiscent of when your goggles fog up, but you still get a crispy sliver of vision over in the corner; or when your eyes retreat, out of focus from being overworked. The feathered texture of the airbrush among the defined lines of oils and acrylics creates an itch to keep looking, to see what you can decipher in this shattered world. These are definitely ambitious, technically accomplished works.

Yet the more interesting pieces of the show are the smaller, untitled works hung beneath. These are a mixture of oils and marker and airbrush in beautiful palettes of sage and roasted pepper red, with shocks of neon pink airbrush. They are gestural and sinuous, melting a bit, impressionist-coded. They create glimpses of the garden, moments of blooming, a sense of tranquility amid a swirl of intentional-yet-free strokes—chaotic yet still, and simply elegant: like Monet’s “Water Lilies.”

Flynn plays with texture and medium: each material is flat, but the stacking, overlapping, layering of them creates depth and narrative. The first one feels like a sunrise, morning cresting in a valley in the mountains, flowers in the fore, the rising red sun warming the day. The fifth feels like a close up shot of a dark green pond with lilies, in the middle of summer. Each builds off the others, whether in their palette, their spontaneity and play, or the gestural motions. Yet they remain unique and on a forward trajectory to new renditions.

Flynn admitted to me he wanted the larger, more technical pieces to be evidence of the skills he has accrued throughout his MFA in painting at the University of Utah and his art practice over the years; to show those who might consider his playful and gestural works immature—as if a kid could do them—evidence of his technical skill. This seems an unfortunate coping mechanism against the art market’s face-palm oblivion to the genius of play, to the spontaneity of experimentation and to the way commodified, department-store art, with all its people-pleasing simplicities (read: boring), has perhaps tainted the consumers’ idea of “good” or “technical” art.

At least to this writer, the untitled series is much more interesting, more thought-provoking: nothing to prove here, besides imagination. The prowess of the artist’s trade is evident in the play, in the freedom of expression the untitled series has to offer. Where could these experiments lead? Perhaps to bigger projects in this same vein that prove the same thing: using the provisional to create a masterpiece? Admittedly, the Photoshop project was an experiment as well. But the repetition of the untitled series seems to bring humanity and the artist’s practice to light. They become an intimate look at the evolution of the artist and his mind space, in the studio and where it took him that day.

Nolan Flynn & Noir Artworkss, Harrington Art Studio, Midvale, through May 13.

Genevieve Vahl

Genevieve Vahl is a writer, farmer and artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her writing focuses on how art and community intersect, how to bring access to food and covering climate solutions around the Salt Lake Valley. She also writes poetry, binds artist books, makes paper and runs cyanotype prints from film.