Installation view of Terrel Van Leeuwen’s oil paintings at “A” Gallery, where intimate landscapes and urban scenes reveal a departure from the artist’s better-known monochrome drawings.

Modern scholars have revised their opinions on the part that things like talent, energy, determination, and even intelligence play in achieving success. Sure, those things are helpful, but none now seems so critical as luck. Good fortune is essential; bad luck can cancel all those advantages. A good example is what you are doing right now: reading. Take a moment to think about the Anglo-Saxon world back in 1066. In that year, Britain was invaded simultaneously by Viking and Norman-French armies. King Harold first marched his army north, where his forces soundly defeated the Vikings. Then they wheeled around and marched south to meet the French, who, being fresh, overcame them in battle and took control of the whole country. As a result, English, its structure derived from Germanic origins, has a vocabulary largely borrowed from French.

Now consider the recent fate of Terrel Van Leeuwen, a local artist who is generally acknowledged, with his consent, to practice a single medium: conté crayon. Not long ago, however, Van Leeuwen brought a suite of colorful figure portraits to BDAC, where they hung among some of his astonishing black-and-white nature studies, landscapes, and florals. But due to unforeseen circumstances, very few viewers saw them, other than in the pages of 15 Bytes. The reason was the unprecedented and unexpected COVI-19 pandemic, which flummoxed even the authorities and brought about a lot of what became controversial shutting down and staying home.

“Assemblage,” (conté crayon, 18×18 in.) is part of “A” Gallery’s “Love in the Abstract” exhibit.

Van Leeuwen’s bad experience came back to me with help from the 15 Bytes search engine, and his entry into Love in the Abstract, currently at “A” Gallery. One of his elaborately drawn floral studies marks the clearest connection to the theme of the show, but can easily be overlooked among much larger and more colorful new works. Yet it’s only necessary to walk a short distance, to the hallway behind the front desk, to see some more of the artist’s rarely-shown oils.

Four paintings, their placement seeming to do with being the same size as their companion works, demonstrate qualities that might explain what draws Van Leeuwen to produce them. One obvious reason is color. The break from monochrome just might allow an artist suffused with black and white to recalibrate his entire sensory mode. But possibly of equal significance is the texture. Crayon, like graphite, wants to be smooth. This allows the image to come about as close as possible to appearing as if the object were present, with no human intervention. Leonardo da Vinci almost certainly created the paradigm for this kind of art making. But in his oils, Van Leeuwen explores the range of possible effects, from subtle-but-visible brush strokes to full-on impasto, which make the presence of the artist’s sensibilities unmistakable and initiate a collaborative dialogue between artist and viewer. At “A” Gallery the subjects are once again, as they were at BDAC, distinctively Western and local. The railroad in “Transit” is a TRAX train and the three desert locations are familiar as types, whether we recognize them specifically or not. Where the Conté Crayon drawings contain a way of seeing that Terrel Van Leeuwen knows and shares with us, the oils capture things we already know and freely share among us.

Terrel Van Leeuwen’s “Transit” translates a familiar stretch of Utah infrastructure into a moody nocturne, where artificial light and industrial forms stand in for landscape and horizon.

Love in the Abstract, “A” Gallery, Salt Lake City, through Feb. 21.

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.