{"id":8024,"date":"2011-11-03T08:51:05","date_gmt":"2011-11-03T08:51:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=8024"},"modified":"2023-11-25T12:17:28","modified_gmt":"2023-11-25T18:17:28","slug":"kent-christensen-artist-profile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/kent-christensen-artist-profile\/","title":{"rendered":"Kent Christensen: Artist Profile"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nYou could call him the Candy Man. A fine artist who paints appealing confections with many layers of meaning, Kent Christensen sells his work at a gallery in London, at Williams Fine Art in Salt Lake City, and splits his time between a small apartment in New York City and a stunning, light-filled home he built at Sundance five years ago. Not a bad life for someone who does things like the Spiral Jetty in saltwater taffy as a 6-foot oil. He sold that to a client in Chicago but keeps a smaller version in his Utah home.<\/p>\n

To appreciate the irony of that picture you have to make some associations. Christensen is LDS and believes sugar is \u201cMormon heroin\u201d \u2013 a should-be subsidiary to strong drink and tobacco as a vice in the LDS lexicon. And he thinks the concept of vast overconsumption of sweet stuff applies to society at large \u2013 not only to Americans supersizing every Coke they order but to the current financial crisis as well. And, he says, \u201cIn the art world, when you mention Utah, people immediately think of the Spiral Jetty.\u201d So, there\u2019s saltwater (the \u201cGreat\u201d Lake wherein the Jetty sits) and taffy. And \u201cSweet\u201c Candy Co. that makes the sticky stuff which is usually sold in \u201cbulk.\u201d It\u2019s like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon \u2013 you can go on and on.<\/p>\n

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“Salt Water Jetty” by Kent Christensen<\/p><\/div>\n

Christensen does like to play games with his art. He hides things in it, pays homage to other artists and different cultures, often has a darker meaning to his charming images and appreciates viewers who take the time to uncover them.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s so much fun for me to watch people at gallery openings discover things that I\u2019ve put in my paintings and . . . sort of poke at riddles that might be there. To me the work is about the communication, the light that I see on someone\u2019s face when they get it. And you can\u2019t get that experience if you\u2019re explaining things away all the time. It has to be experienced in real time, the way you have to go to a play and watch something unfold in real time. I can\u2019t tell you how great a play was and re-create the experience of sitting in the theater and watching the scenes unfold in the way the playwright and actors create that experience for you by telling you about it. You have to actually be there in person. I try to do the same thing with my work.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But different cultures see different things in his work. Christensen recalls that in a 2007 London show, the Brits looked at his painting of green Jell-O \u201cand said, \u2018What is THAT?\u2019 But they were the first to recognize that it\u2019s an homage to the American minimalist, sculptor Donald Judd.|1|<\/strong>\u00a0It\u2019s rewarding to me as a painter when people have done their homework.\u201d<\/p>\n

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“Number 24 Green Jell-O” by Kent Christensen<\/p><\/div>\n

Hard to know what Londoners might think of the Pez dispensers\u00a0|2|<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 do they even celebrate Halloween across the pond? Set against the New York skyline, the portraits are remarkable. The perfect plastic sheen on Garfield\u2019s face, the carefully carved and shadowed trade name on their sides, the way each could be cut out to stand on its own yet works perfectly as part of the whole. That\u2019s how Christensen thinks. \u201cEven when I\u2019m painting one object I\u2019m thinking about how it would look if I did a series of them, or put them in a circle,\u201d he says. The grins on Garfield and the snowman are comparable, Bugs and the Easter Bunny are hilarious in juxtaposition and Mickey and the witch are somehow each simultaneously evil and comic, but how does one decide what to paint when there are hundreds of images from which to select?<\/p>\n

Turns out Christensen had accumulated quite a collection as his kids were growing up. (Wife Janet works at a financial firm in midtown Manhattan; daughter Anne, 23, works on Wall Street; Jane, a senior at Timpview High in Provo just celebrated her 18th birthday at The Leonardo, where her father has an upcoming two-week residency.)<\/p>\n

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“Sacred and Profane Pez” by Kent Christensen<\/p><\/div>\n

The artist recalls laying out the Pez dispensers, \u201ctrying to group things together, creating relationships, and I found these six kind of went together well. Because it\u2019s called \u2018Sacred and Profane Pez,\u2019 you have these three sacred sort of images on the left that are less commercial, a little more traditional like the Easter Bunny, and on the right the crass, louder versions, Garfield, Mickey. They started pairing up nicely in several ways.\u201d Could they be mirror images? \u201cOften people don\u2019t get that until you tell them about it. That\u2019s true of a lot of things in my work. People just sort of think it\u2019s pretty. I think I try to make it pretty, actually, because that only plays up the underlying sinister nature of some of the work.<\/p>\n

I started out doing pretty things for Sam Wilson up at the U. [where he got his MFA] because I had this stuff in my studio that I brought to look at, you know, to snack on while I was working [laughs], and Sam couldn\u2019t understand why I wasn\u2019t painting them . . . and then instead of just painting pretty things that were special, like ribbon candy,|3|\u00a0<\/strong>I started painting ordinary things, like candy corn . . . You don\u2019t see ribbon candy very often and when you do it\u2019s just pretty, but everybody knows what candy corn is and now it\u2019s everywhere all year round. You have a Christmas version and an Easter version. You can use it as a sort of prop on another level because it\u2019s so ordinary. In my case I could make circles\u00a0|4|<\/strong>\u00a0of it or really throw you [off] a bit and make it big, larger than life.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n