Artists often enter school with raw talent and leave with newly sharpened skills, expected to begin careers—sometimes before they’ve lived long enough to know what they want to say. That possibility nagged at Ben Childress. After a year at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, he stepped away. “I felt like I didn’t have much to say yet,” he recalls. “I wanted to live life a little first.”

Living life turned out to be no easy apprenticeship. Much of Childress’ twenties were spent drifting between Portland and Salt Lake City, working a string of jobs that rarely lasted long. At one point he found himself hauling pianos around Portland with a boss who, he says, “wanted to teach me how to fight.” Another job had him in the blending room at the Tazo Tea factory, mixing batches of loose tea that would eventually be sealed into tea bags. “It got everywhere,” he says. “In your ears, in your nose—you’re swallowing it all day.” There were stretches when the drinking overtook everything else. “I had friends who would buy me a handle of whiskey every week,” he says. “I was just going through it.” Eventually he was caught drinking on the job while moving pianos. He describes the end of that job as “a mutual dissolution of the relationship.” Other jobs followed—courier work, valet shifts, whatever came along. “I think I was unhappy for a long time after I left school,” he says. “I always had this feeling like—what am I doing here?”

Art never disappeared entirely. Childress had drawn obsessively as a kid and continued to sketch when he could, eventually turning to painting. The medium, he says, offers something drawing never quite did. “Painting makes me feel worse while I’m doing it,” he says. “I’m constantly questioning my abilities and why I’m doing anything in life—especially this. But when it’s finished it’s incredibly satisfying.”

After more than a decade of drifting between Portland and Utah, Childress finally settled back in Salt Lake City. In his thirties he returned to school, finishing the degree he had abandoned years earlier at the University of Utah. By then he was older than many of his classmates and far more focused. One of his professors kept pressing him about the work he was making. “He just kept asking me, ‘Why are you doing this?’” Childress recalls. “At first I thought it was just because it looked cool. But the more I thought about it, I realized it was probably me dealing with the aftermath. I don’t process emotions that well.”

During those years of drifting and uncertainty, one steady presence remained in his life: his father, who transitioned when Childress was young and later lived as a woman. Despite her own struggles, she remained firmly in his corner. “My dad was always encouraging me to keep doing art,” he says. “Even when I wasn’t sure it made sense.”

Her death a few years ago forced a reckoning. Without the quiet safety net that had existed for so long, Childress found himself confronting the question he had postponed for years. “After my dad passed away, it kind of hit me,” he says. “This is the only thing I’m good at. I’ve had like twenty different jobs. This is the only thing that really brings me any sort of fulfillment or happiness.” His father’s passing also left a small if temporary financial cushion. For the first time, he committed himself to painting full-time. Now, nearing forty, Childress works out of Poor Yorick Studios in South Salt Lake, where canvases spill into the hallways.

In the months following his father’s death, Childress found himself wandering the streets around Salt Lake City’s Ninth & Ninth neighborhood, where he had spent time growing up and skateboarding with friends. He began walking through the narrow service corridors behind the houses, photographing the spaces that most people pass without noticing. Around the same time, an old photograph resurfaced on his phone: a snapshot taken years earlier during a light installation at the Gateway, where colored lights cast ghostly shadows of people against a wall. The image had seemed interesting at the time but had sat forgotten for years. Seeing it again sparked an idea. Childress began combining the shadow figures with photographs of alleyways in digital collages before translating the images into paintings.

The result is a body of work that feels both ordinary and slightly unsettling. In many of the paintings, the alleyways themselves are rendered in muted or monochromatic tones—greens, blues, or grays that flatten the space and evoke the feel of a faded photograph. Moving through these corridors are vivid silhouettes: figures formed from layered colored shadows, receding into the distance. “I love the image of figures just going off into the distance,” Childress says. “There’s something about the unknown in that.”

“The work is really about identity and place,” he says, “and how those two things come together to make who we are.” The alleyways themselves carry traces of older neighborhoods. Built as service corridors for early twentieth-century homes, they remain largely overlooked today—functional spaces that exist just out of view of the carefully composed fronts of neighborhoods. For Childress, that quality is part of their appeal. “An alleyway is a space that’s always there but kind of ignored,” he says. “But if you really look at it, there’s a lot going on in those places.”

Childress has spoken about his tendency to repress emotions rather than confront them directly. Seen in that light, the shadow figures drifting through Salt Lake City’s alleyways begin to feel less like anonymous passersby and more like fragments of memory—presences that linger just at the edge of recognition.

His first opportunity to show the work in a substantial way came with a solo exhibition at the Salt Lake City Public Library in December and January. For Childress, the venue carried its own history. As a kid he had spent hours there flipping through art books and wandering through the gallery spaces, imagining the lives of the artists whose work hung there. To return years later as one of those artists felt like a quiet full-circle moment.

The opening brought together old friends, family members, and curious visitors passing through the library. The response was encouraging. But the emotional arc of a show doesn’t end with the opening. A friend warned him about a side of exhibiting many artists know well: the postpartum slump that can follow months of preparation. “You work so hard to get to this one thing,” Childress says. “And then you do it and it’s over. It’s like, okay… now what?”

Fortunately, he didn’t have long to linger in that feeling. Finch Lane Gallery had already scheduled another exhibition, which meant new deadlines and new canvases waiting in the studio. Within days he was back at Poor Yorick, pushing the shadow imagery further—experimenting with monochrome alleyways, isolating the shadow figures, and exploring how the images might evolve into new environments and memories.

Today, the studio reflects that ongoing experimentation. One wall holds the familiar alleyway scenes, while on an easel sits something entirely different: a floral painting in progress, its bright colors pushing against the surface of the canvas. Childress says he’s working on it for his mother—an art lover with her own tastes and interests—who, he jokes, might prefer something like this to the darker alleyway paintings that could disturb the balance of her walls. He moves easily between subjects, switching gears when the alleyways begin to feel too familiar. At the studio door, Miss Milton, his Great Dane, keeps watch, occasionally lifting her head when someone passes down the hallway outside.

For years Childress chased quicker forms of escape—drinking, drugs, anything that promised immediate relief. Painting has offered something different. “Drugs make you feel good in the moment,” he says. “Painting makes you feel worse first and better later.” He’s learning to live with that slower reward. “I’m okay with delayed gratification,” he says. After a couple of decades finding his way back to the studio, he just might find it.

Benjamin Childress: Shadows and Alleyways, Finch Lane Gallery, Salt Lake City, through Apr. 10. Gallery Stroll Reception: Fri., Mar 20, 6-9pm: Salt Lake Gallery Stroll.

All images courtesy of the author.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.