![\"\"](\"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/jeff_pugh_at_work-1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/h4>\n- \n\t\t\t
- \n\t\t\t\t
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/jeff_pugh_at_work2-1-350x233.jpg\")
<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt><\/dl>- \n\t\t\t
- \n\t\t\t\t
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/jeff_pugh_detailwork-2-350x233.jpg\")
<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt><\/dl>
\n\t\t<\/div>\n\nImages by Simon Blundell<\/p>\n
Although landscape may be the signature subject for Utah painters, there are as many approaches to painting the land as there are painters who paint it. Many of these approaches derive from straightforward methodology, revealing nothing more than the rocks and the hills and the sky being painted. And then there are other approaches that defy traditional definitions and do something different, attempt something new.<\/h4>\n
The key words\u00a0do<\/em>, and\u00a0attempt<\/em>\u00a0are optimal in a description of the work of painter Jeff Pugh, whose work\u00a0does\u00a0<\/em>more than is expected of traditional landscape and whose work\u00a0attempts\u00a0<\/em>to accomplish something more than a conventional landscape might suggest. Pugh\u2019s landscapes are ambitious, they are successful, and they are true in their accomplishment of so much, within the space of so little \u2014 the work of gestalt, an attainment of much more than the totality of the composite parts of a whole might suggest.<\/h4>\n
Pugh\u2019s works are noted for their jarring and irregular linear quality. Anything but the smooth and crisp quality of traditional painting, Pugh\u2019s works are carved out with his palette knife in a distinctive and characteristic manner. \u201cThere is a certain imperfection that occurs when the viewer can put back together fragments of paint that are nothing but square dabs of a particular flesh tone that is nothing more than a value, a smudge of paint,\u201d says Pugh about his the effect of his technique, \u201cbut the person ends up seeing this as a finished piece.\u201d\u00a0 Pugh recognizes that his work has a high level of abstraction, so he stops short when it is suggested that he is also a Realist.<\/h4>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/jeff_pugh_detail-1-1200x800.jpg\")
<\/a><\/h4>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/jeff_pugh_geometry-1-1200x800.jpg\")
<\/a><\/h4>\nYes, Pugh paints landscapes that construct or delineate, invent or articulate, but regardless of Pugh\u2019s professed methodologies of abstraction, he works on the level of a Realist, responsive to the reality of his subject as art and not illusion. Pugh is under no delusion that the tree with the angular outline broken up into fragments by linear areas of differentiated light and dark is an illusion of what one might see along the pond at Liberty Park. No. Pugh is acknowledging the truth in the tree that is irregular and is heavily shadowed, although Pugh uses this substance as structure and like parts to the whole, makes a play of the shape, the line, the contrasts, and the geometrical shapes created within the tree when light is broken by darkness.<\/h4>\n
The acknowledgement of Realism in the academic sense of the word is the first step to the consciousness of significance in the measure of gestalt in Pugh\u2019s work. Gestalt is the ultimate designator of meaning and context to all of Pugh\u2019s efforts and the identification of Realism in a shadow of a bush that has no gradation, that is pure shape, that is starchy and irregular, a shadow that is about principles of design more than it is about the shadow of a bush, this Realism is the first step towards realization and recognition of the fuller measure of what Pugh\u2019s works amount to be.<\/h4>\n
In Pugh\u2019s \u201cFarm Houses,\u201d the two barns are flat planes of crimson red with no intimation of depth between them. Each has a blue-gray tin roof, which in academic analytical formalism distinguishes its recession by difference in tonality between planes, which otherwise juxtaposed will appear flat. The horizon line is resolutely flat, supporting trees that nestle the barns. The sharp precision here between light and shadow with many spaces of both creating distinguishable squared shapes is much in the manner of Maynard Dixon, a Modernist. Very much like Dixon are Pugh\u2019s sloping hills beyond the barns. Dixon painted planes of shape with differentiated hue and tone. He created, for example, foreshortening, but would use segments rather than shading for depth. This is exactly what Pugh is doing with the hills: we see four distinctive ribbons of color alternating between violet-blue and sable brown. The mind understands the blue as recession but the eye sees a flat hillside broken up into shapes of structure. This is a Realist approach to a subject and the use of form in that context.<\/h4>\n
- \n\t\t\t
- \n\t\t\t\t
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/jeff_pugh_palette-1-350x233.jpg\")
<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt><\/dl>- \n\t\t\t
- \n\t\t\t\t
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/jeff_pugh_paintings-1-350x233.jpg\")
<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt><\/dl>- \n\t\t\t
- \n\t\t\t\t
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/jeff_pugh_pntgs-1-350x233.jpg\")
<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt><\/dl>- \n\t\t\t
- \n\t\t\t\t
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/jeff_pugh_studio-1-350x233.jpg\")
<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt><\/dl>
\n\t\t<\/div>\n\nAccording to Pugh, when asked about the responsiveness between artist, viewer, and art, he states that, \u201cIf you are interested in a photo I am doing, you might as well just look at the photo, but if you want to know how I\u2019m feeling about the subject in the photo, then you are going to have to look at the painting.\u201d According to Pugh, his work is a reflection on himself and how he is feeling at the time of execution.\u00a0 Thus the abstraction that is so much a part of Pugh\u2019s work is the kind that is infused with a personal subjectivity, detected in his very approach to painting.\u00a0 More than any source of meaning in the art of today is the expression of the subjective.<\/h4>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/jeff_pugh_portrait-1-350x525.jpg\")
<\/a>Pugh states unabashedly, \u201cI am a huge proponent that there is God in everything. This includes the division of thirds; the golden mean, in the landscape, in a face, everything about anybody is divided into the golden ratio. Applying that same idea, that principle into my paintings, I think it goes beyond logic into a religious belief, of what I do and what I do with it.\u00a0 There is a reason that I pick the structures that I do.\u201d\u00a0 Further and of even more interest, \u201cIf you start looking at these paintings, the root of something like a barn, can be representational of human life, it can be representational of structures of safety, it can be a representation of hard work, or any number of things.\u201d<\/h4>\nHere, we find that the basis for Pugh\u2019s composition and every compositional element within the composition is something sacred to this artist. Further, the elements he uses attribute further meanings, all being truth to Pugh, and all having a universal significance. Pugh has synthesized perfectly the formal reality of the very substance of his work with his most deep-seeded core beliefs.\u00a0 Even more current today than the merely subjective is when the subjective synthesizes so seamlessly with the form, with a new emphasis on form, and this is exactly what Pugh is achieving as \u201cthe totality of the composite parts of a whole might suggest\u201d becomes so much more.<\/h4>\n
- \n\t\t\t
- \n\t\t\t\t
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/jeff_pugh_stacks-1-350x525.jpg\")
<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt><\/dl>
- \n\t\t\t\t
- \n\t\t\t\t
- \n\t\t\t\t
- \n\t\t\t\t
- \n\t\t\t\t
- \n\t\t\t\t