{"id":58388,"date":"2021-05-21T12:57:33","date_gmt":"2021-05-21T18:57:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=58388"},"modified":"2021-05-30T08:47:57","modified_gmt":"2021-05-30T14:47:57","slug":"58388","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/58388\/","title":{"rendered":"John Erickson: Some Things are Inside, Some Things are Outside"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“Here To Here Through Here,” mixed media, 12 x 10 in.<\/p><\/div>\n

Utah artists like what they do. If any of them feels tortured, they\u2019ve kept it to themselves. Some see their art as a prayer, others feel like telling a story. Some see art as a challenge to take on. A popular gallery like Phillips can pull together three painters at one time that neatly balance each other and show the range of what art can do.<\/h4>\n

John Erickson might well be called an academic painter. He\u2019s taught artists at the U of U for thirty years, but that\u2019s not what\u2019s meant here. What makes his painting academic is an underlying quality; a feeling that behind his brush lies the history of painting, how it developed and what it\u2019s capable of achieving. Here\u2019s a metaphor: suppose a painting can consist of 25% composition, 25% perspective, 25% anatomy, 25% light and 25% shadow, 25% action, 25% line, mass, subject matter, theme, and so on . . . seen this way, no one element in a painting is enough to complete it, but together the parts are more than sufficient. So an artist like Erickson can selectively include and creatively omit what he observes and what he knows about it, and not only leave the eye satisfied, but take it along on a journey of discovery that keeps the early childhood thrill of learning how to see and decipher appearances an active pleasure throughout life.<\/h4>\n
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“Profile,” mixed media, 36 x 24 in.<\/p><\/div>\n

Perhaps the most comprehensive thing painting like Erickson\u2019s reveals about the visual is how what we see falls midway between what lies deep within a thing and what is external, bounding it in space. A painter gets to choose: do we see its interior, its structure, like a cut-away or X-ray view? Do we see what surrounds it, limits it, is displaced by it? Two perfect examples are at hand: in 2014, 15 Bytes\u2019 chose Utah\u2019s 15 most important working artists, and in the book that resulted John Erickson, one of those chosen, was represented by a painting titled “Build a Woman.” Seven years later, the show at Phillips discussed here includes “Profile.” Although the two works approach their subjects, both women, in variously differing ways, each combines analysis of the figure\u2019s interior with a three-dimensional study of what surrounds it, ultimately directing attention to the surface of the head and shoulders. Each then shows how the image, the “skin” results from pairs of forces: some from within pressing out, the others outside pressing in.<\/h4>\n

Any show this good will inevitably offer lessons in painting to those who are ready to learn. Without having made progressive copies of a single work, the large variety shown here include the various stages of a work in progress. There are no preparatory drawings per se, but drawing like that seen in “Profile” can be found in many places, including in “Above All Others,” which leaves the plywood base partly exposed, the paint puddled along the edge in a frozen display of its fluid characteristics. In spite of being titled, atmospheric watercolors remain close to their origin in sketches or studies. And in the finished works, Erickson revels in a playground that includes, but is not limited to: Expressionism \u2014 painting emotions onto the bodies that contain or evoke them; Dada \u2014 in which the destructive impact of a World War is brought to bear on \u2018civilized\u2019 society; and Surrealism \u2014 where dreams take on appearances and identities.<\/h4>\n
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“Above All Others,” mixed media, 48 x 48 in.<\/p><\/div>\n

Viewers may feel that when they see a painting like “Here to Here Through Here,” wherein a red-winged blackbird in flight casts its shadow on the sky, turning it into a painted backdrop (which it is), some explanation must wait to be puzzled out. But pictures don\u2019t wait to be turned into language \u2014 this review not withstanding \u2014 pictures come before language, and are better connected to feelings than words. Several works, like “Above All Others” and “Ecstasy and Oblivion,” present what appear to be nighttime visions through plate glass windows, while others, “Here To Here Through Here” and “Fly By,” are seen through an opaque wall near the corner of a room. In both cases, they feel like the way things feel in life: some things are inside, some things are outside, but some things that seem to be outside are actually inside, reflected in the glass, or projected on the wall.<\/h4>\n
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“Ecstasy And Oblivion,” mixed media, 40 x 40 in.<\/p><\/div>\n

John Erickson<\/em>, Phillips Gallery<\/a>, Salt Lake City, through June 11.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Utah artists like what they do. If any of them feels tortured, they\u2019ve kept it to themselves. Some see their art as a prayer, others feel like telling a story. Some see art as a challenge to take on. A popular gallery like Phillips can pull together three […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":847,"featured_media":58389,"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":[19,14],"tags":[546,157],"class_list":["post-58388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts","tag-john-erickson","tag-phillips-gallery"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/JOER412_HereToHereThroughHere.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-20 13:35:38","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\/58388","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\/847"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58388"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58395,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58388\/revisions\/58395"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}