{"id":31277,"date":"2002-10-02T10:14:21","date_gmt":"2002-10-02T16:14:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=31277"},"modified":"2025-11-25T22:47:45","modified_gmt":"2025-11-26T05:47:45","slug":"the-court-jester-builds-a-castle-brad-slaugh-and-the-poor-yorick-artist-studios","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/the-court-jester-builds-a-castle-brad-slaugh-and-the-poor-yorick-artist-studios\/","title":{"rendered":"The Court Jester Builds a Castle: Brad Slaugh and the Poor Yorick Artist Studios"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

by Kim Duffy<\/span><\/span><\/i>
\nphotos by Jamie Clyde<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

A number of Salt Lake City artists call 530 West 700 South their home.\u00a0 Brad Slaugh, who created the space, calls it Poor Yorick Studios.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

How came the studio to be named Poor Yorick?\u00a0 It\u2019s named for King Hamlet\u2019s jester Yorick, whose skull is thrown up by a sexton while digging a grave.\u00a0 Prince Hamlet takes the skull in his hands and says, \u201cAlas, poor Yorick!\u00a0 I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy . . . Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that we were wont to set the table on a roar?\u00a0 Not one now, to mock your own grinning?\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>It\u2019s about the skull, right?\u00a0 Painters will have their skulls.\u00a0 Or perhaps it references artists playing the part of the jester, the fringe, the one able to mask the truth behind clever words.\u00a0 Whatever Brad Slaugh had in mindwhen he started fleshing out Poor Yorick studios, he must be pleased with his vision made real.\u00a0 After sitting on Artspace\u2019s waiting list for years, and then subletting, sharing, and losing a space on 4th North, he must have been feeling much on the fringe.\u00a0 Now he has completed the Herculean task of converting a former manufacturing warehouse into studios by framing it into workable spaces, updating wiring and heating, and installing lights and skylights.\u00a0 After months of work, nearly a score of studios is finished \u2013 and filled — and Slaugh can go back to his other job: painting.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Slaugh\u2019s large studio\/office is already nearly filled, floor to ceiling, with charcoal and pastel drawings of wobbly, energetic characters.\u00a0 This is how his paintings begin \u2013 as blind drawings from life or from a photo, in order to limit his feedback, his editor, and allow him to suspend his disbelief while making a drawing.\u00a0 He likes to see it as playing a game instead of coming in with a preconceived notion.\u00a0 Like a musician in a trance.\u00a0 Like his daughter\u2019s drawings, which also appear in the studio.\u00a0 He not only does a blind contour drawing but does the shading blind as well, sometimes making drawings that grow six or eight feet tall.\u00a0 What comes of it is a crap shoot, but Brad has been doing this for so long that he now has an extensive and rich cast of people and dogs waiting on his walls.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Slaugh likes using the human form in an expressive way.\u00a0 He studied painters like Odd Nerdrum and Lucian Freud, but his real heroine and hero are Alice Neel and Egon Shiele, whose figures he prefers for their vulnerability.\u201d The game that I\u2019m playing is the experience of reality run through the filter of \u201cyou.\u201d\u00a0 Everything I do is a variation, even plein air.\u00a0 There\u2019s a tension for me between improvisational drawing \u2013 the on and off the rabbit trails \u2013 and the grand composition, like The Raft of the Medusa<\/i> — the height of Western Art.\u00a0 Improvisation is the place where there\u2019s the most juice.\u00a0 But it\u2019s incomplete.\u00a0 A lot of artists are after the sexy, effortlessness you see in Sargeant\u2019s paintings.\u00a0 I\u2019d rather have something overworked than sloppy.\u00a0 Structure without overproducing.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Slaugh has done enormous murals of family gatherings.\u00a0 They take place in city parks, storage units, or in a dining room with fake paneling on the walls.\u00a0 The full-colored figures are distorted, sometimes grotesque.\u00a0 Perspective jumps in and out at the viewer. There is a lot to take in, not only in the narrative of the painting, but in the ways in which distortion fools with the viewer\u2019s eye and emotions.\u00a0 A good example is a piece Slaugh did after a grade school class portrait.\u00a0 Did girls really look like Martians?\u00a0 Did the teacher really have a gigantic head?\u00a0 Did the principal look like a mortician?\u00a0 If most of us drift back in our memories of grade school, the answer is: \u201cYes.\u201d\u00a0 Slaugh has gotten it right.<\/span><\/p>\n

The hallways of Poor Yorick are plastered with paintings, photos, insults, and jibes; this makes it worth a trip even when the gallery isn\u2019t having one of its biannual openings.\u00a0 It\u2019s exciting to see works in progress, works which haven\u2019t suffered death-by-framing.\u00a0 Mark England\u2019s huge map-like landscapes with collage occupy a generous portion of the hallway.\u00a0 On his door is a calendar quote from The Onion:\u00a0 \u201cLike boxes of shit in your house?\u00a0 Get a cat.\u201d\u00a0 (A profile of England appears in the April 2002 archive of this magazine.)\u00a0 He is happy to have moved into the studio and credits Slaugh with creating a good dynamic there.\u00a0 He finds it a generous climate and will propose both a discussion group and a drawing studio among the artists<\/span><\/p>\n

Visiting some of the younger artist\u2019s studios can be like going into a teenager\u2019s bedroom that is full of the unedited collection of everything they have been about from childhood on.\u00a0 You get a look at all their phases, corny through self-aware and back again.\u00a0 In the case of the bedroom, it might contain stuffed animals, baseball cards, ravaged Barbie dolls, Nirvana posters, Mad Magazines, and finally beer bottles \u2013 all in the same bedroom.\u00a0 In the artist\u2019s studio there might be tentative figure studies, tenuous landscapes, nice figure studies, confident landscapes, abstract pieces, landscapes which become more abstract, and paintings which have been sanded down to the point of being abstract.\u00a0 It\u2019s a pleasure to sort through these collections.\u00a0 It\u2019s telling about a person that they could have reached such facility in a few short years, already messed with it, then moved back towards a suitable hybrid.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"8\"<\/a>Down the hallway from Mark England is Steve Larson, who shares a studio with Jason Jones.\u00a0 Jones wasn\u2019t in so we couldn\u2019t sort through his stuff.\u00a0 When we visited Larson was photographing a large, raw, abstract painting on an unfinished scavenged board with added fabric texture.\u00a0 Larson says he goes through the same visual concepts in abstract pieces as he does representational pieces.\u00a0 He likes doing both, but he especially likes trying to get in between the two, getting more at the energy of the subject.\u00a0 When he doesn\u2019t paint from life, he doesn\u2019t use photos but instead \u201chalf references and half conjures.\u201d\u00a0 He has done some interesting pieces of the neighborhood around Poor Yorick and lately he seems to be getting at the \u201cin between\u201d he favors.\u00a0 Larson shows at the Avenues Art Center and he and Jones have some pieces up at Glendinning Gallery through November 28.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"3a\"<\/a>Down the hall is Chris Thornock.\u00a0 In his very orderly studio hang images of children in landscapes, and a few straight landscapes.\u00a0 The models are the most patient models he can get, his children.\u00a0 What is most striking about Thornock\u2019s images is the way he paints skin. He says that, because the part of his work that interests him most is the narrative, the act of applying paint can often be boring.\u00a0 So he does things \u201cto treat himself\u201d like doing a great ear, a closed eyelid, or a bare- chested boy where he can concentrate on the different color of skin tones from transparent blue all the way to tan.\u00a0 He admires Eakins and Wyeth and he feels that his paintings have a distinct American feel.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"1a\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Jason Wheatley only had one or two paintings in his studio, having sent the rest of them off to galleries in San Francisco and Palm Desert.\u00a0 Wheatley can be monosyllabic.\u00a0 It\u2019s difficult to drag much out of him, but one only need look at his paintings to see what his consciousness is crowded with: pelicans, pigeons, fish, dogs, shrines, vases, cymbals, lemons, cages, parasols, monkeys, lilies, and statues of Jesus.\u00a0 His compositions are jammed with crisp, clean, well-rendered, photo-real objects in luxurious colors within a highly glazed surface.\u00a0 I asked him if gallery owners ever encourage him to paint one image, or group of images, because they sell better.\u00a0 No, he said, even when gallery owners tell him to lay off the monkeys because monkeys aren\u2019t selling very well, he paints more monkeys and they sell anyway.\u00a0 One woman did return a painting after she discovered within it that Jesus was holding a parasol.\u00a0 Wheatley sets up elaborate still lifes and augments that with manipulated photographs.\u00a0 I asked him if one of the photos of a dog riding a bicycle, behind a monkey on a tricycle, was manipulated and he said, \u201cThe dog was really on the bicycle, and the monkey was really on the tricycle, but not all at the same time.\u201d\u00a0 Wheatley has a show in New York in May.\u00a0 He will be fooling around with a little more chaos in his surfaces in the future, working with a more \u201clost and found\u201d approach.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sri Zeno Whipple (hippie parents) is a newcomer to the studio, in fact most of his paintings had to be viewed at Sargeant Salon in Exchange Place.\u00a0 There is a series of alarming heads \u2013 the same large, loosely painted male (that looks like a female) head.\u00a0 One of them is the least resolved of the three, and the face is still.\u00a0 The next is further resolved and the face looks to be screaming.\u00a0 The third is the most resolved but the paint has been smeared quickly back and forth to give it the impression of movement, as if he is wildly shaking his head back and forth.\u00a0 He also has a series of still lifes which are careful, realist paintings of pears, cups, and flowers, and which seem to have been painted by a different painter than the one of the scary heads.\u00a0 One in particular is a study in grey and white of an onion.\u00a0 It\u2019s so bereft of color that it could almost be a black and white painting, but then there is just the barest hint of green from the garden, visible through a thin, thin, layer of onion skin.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This is a fraction of the artists at Poor Yorick.\u00a0 The others currently on the roster are Trent Alvey, Joey Behrens, David Laub, Tom Mulder, Ryan Peterson, Alex Ferguson, Tracy Strauss, Ben Duke, Tessa Lindsey, Jeff Clark, Trent Call, and Zachary Proctor.\u00a0 If you would like to visit the gallery call Brad Slaugh at 759-8681, or just pop in and decide for yourself whither lies the infinite jest.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Kim Duffy photos by Jamie Clyde A number of Salt Lake City artists call 530 West 700 South their home.\u00a0 Brad Slaugh, who created the space, calls it Poor Yorick Studios.\u00a0 How came the studio to be named Poor Yorick?\u00a0 It\u2019s named for King Hamlet\u2019s jester Yorick, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":99672,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,22,14],"tags":[697,2682,1646,1221],"class_list":["post-31277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-15-bytes","category-studio_space","category-visual_arts","tag-brad-slaugh","tag-christopher-thornock","tag-poor-yorick-studios","tag-sri-whipple"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2002\/10\/9-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-30 05:43:14","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31277"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99675,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31277\/revisions\/99675"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}