Painting Grace
Brian Kershisnik draws followers and fame
By Geoff Wichert
For Brian Kershisnik, the world is not exactly what it seems. This slip between reality and reverie drives one of the most successful Utah artists to create work that is at once original and recognizable.
Nothing else looks like a Brian Kershisnik painting. Marked by a palette that is sweetly simple, and with subjects arranged in deceptively familiar tableaux, Kershisnik’s unmistakable style explains why shows of his paintings routinely sell out before they open. Collectors compete to acquire the most popular images, which can command $50,000 or more. For those who can’t buy the paintings, there are signed reproductions. And a large-format book, Kershisnik: Painting from Life, collects 130 of the paintings, along with photographs of the artist at work and text by his wife, Suzanne, and the renowned poet Leslie Norris.
His success means that audiences know what to expect, anticipating his style as they would an old friend’s smile. What is familiar about a Kershisnik painting, though, is its unfamiliar, dreamlike effect.
The immediate impression is one of simplicity. A typical Kershisnik painting focuses on a small group of characters calmly pursuing some ordinary, if often slightly odd, domestic activity like reading or dancing. Backgrounds, where they exist, tend to be simple landscapes of earth and sky, or Spartan interiors indicated by a chair or a table.
The figures may seem disengaged or lost in ritual, but on closer inspection, their involvement is more ambiguous—as if they are performers who see the next step but are also thinking beyond it to the performance as a whole. Sometimes the action seems unworldly: Figures strike acrobatic poses, fly, or teach each other how to fly. But the metaphors aren’t hard to spot. Who hasn’t thought to describe the negotiations of marriage as a dance, or compared a sense of personal freedom to flying?
There is a sense of nostalgia, of images come down to us from an earlier, simpler time. But these are not history paintings—their period look is an artifact not of the painter’s style, but of the people he paints. Long sleeves and skirts on women’s dresses and men’s white shirts are evidence of modesty in the rural Utah culture Kershisnik celebrates, a culture passed down from the European immigrants who were the first converts to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS).
Focusing on the figures and a few props—books, spoons, pencils, bicycles—Kershisnik gives this world a kind of timelessness. The props and settings that sometimes break in are symbolic—boats suggest the perils of life, horses carry figures to safety, or an occasional crown, flame, or sword reveals a state of being.
His brushwork’s blurred edges and his anatomical distortions—graceful curves one minute and awkward angles the next—reinforce the growing realization that what at first appeared realistic is actually something else.
The way the artist conjures light contributes to this feeling of immateriality. There is never a source for the light in the painting: no sun, no functioning lamp. There are fires but they only illuminate minds. Nor are there shadows to indicate a source of light outside the painting. The figures appear round, but flattened. It could be the light of a dream, but it could also be the illumination of a vision: light emanating from, rather than reflecting off, the figures and objects in the painting.
Kershisnik’s destination was something he had to invent as much as discover, and so was the path he took to get there. Once upon a time, artists apprenticed to established masters, but today a professional artist’s resume is likely to lead straight from the academy to corporate sales.
For Kershisnik, who knew he wanted to shape the world before he had any idea how, preparation was more like a quest. After he graduated from high school in 1980, a survey course with Peter Goss at the University of Utah persuaded him to become an architect. But there was no undergraduate degree in architecture, so he concentrated temporarily on ceramics.
At age 19, like most devout LDS college students, he took time off for a mission. Two years spent knocking on strangers’ doors and introducing them to the principles of his religion probably prepared him to share his faith with the public, but there’s no proselytizing in his painting. Instead, it records his personal inquiry into his own faith the way a memoir might.
When he returned to Utah and enrolled at Brigham Young University, that brief interlude in ceramics led him to Joe Bennion, a leading figure in the vibrant Spring City art scene, who offered Kershisnik work at his shop, Horseshoe Mountain Pottery. It quickly became apparent to Kershisnik that he didn’t commune with clay the way he’d hoped to. But Joe’s wife, the widely admired portrait painter Lee Udall Bennion, encouraged him to try painting, and everything changed. Through his degree at BYU and a graduate degree at the University of Texas, “it was painting all the way,” Kershisnik says.
Although he makes a wry face today and describes his first paintings as “dreadful,” he must have felt a swift connection with the medium. Adam Bateman, a contemporary in the Spring City community (and recently the director of the Central Utah Art Center) who witnessed those early days, says his style took shape quickly. Kershisnik agrees—to a point. He says his earliest paintings were landscapes, comparable to the backgrounds behind what he paints today. When the figures first appeared, they were like doubles for viewers. Standing near the edge of the panels, their backs to the audience, they also witnessed the scene. Only as he developed confidence that others would be interested in the ideas and questions that inspire him to paint could those figures move to the center and his anecdotes from real life assume their role as subjects.
Although the scenes and characters he depicts bear a resemblance to the circumstances of his life, they are no more the same than an actor is the character he plays. It’s partly a technical distinction: Although he is a skilled draftsman, he uses no models while painting. He doesn’t begrudge other artists the right to paint from models or photographs, but he finds that models offer too much information that can get in the way of his intentions. So his figures are composites compiled from memory.
He also wants to protect the privacy of his family and neighbors, who would rather not be confused with those who populate his imaginary world. Kanosh, a town of 485 where Kershisnik and his wife settled and live today with two daughters and a son, is the sort of picturesque village where travelers envy the residents while wondering how they earn a living. It is also home to Kershisnik’s extensive family of in-laws, which gives the man a home and the artist a laboratory in which to observe people interacting.
But the most important reason to maintain the independence of his art from his sources is to allow a universal response to the pictures. What the audience brings to the encounter will reshape what he put there. “You have to let their story in,” he says, meaning that a specific event he may set out to depict is less important than the audience’s ability to relate what they see to their own experience.
If “dreamlike” is one way to describe Kershisnik’s art, a core group of his admirers sees it differently. For them, his images accurately depict the cosmic world they know through their shared religious culture. The artist would agree: When he sits before his easel and conjures pictures that include angels, figures from scripture, and symbols of the miraculous, his goal is spiritual truth.
But it’s also the point of ordinary events he tries to capture with spiritual resonance. He has the freedom to paint a purely unworldly scene, but he never does. Wherever it ultimately leads, each painting begins in sensory knowledge of the world we live in. This world fascinates him as much as what lies ahead, and the doors between worlds that are his paintings open in both directions. Kershisnik is a devout believer, but in his art he measures his faith against the only things he can know for sure: the facts of life on earth.
One painting he’s particularly proud of captures this balance between what we see and what we don’t: In Christ Healing a Blind Man, Kershisnik shows Christ with his sleeves rolled up. The painter’s understanding of those who are offered help—that they may find it a challenge to trade the lives they know for new ones—shows in the mute grappling of the two men: Sometimes it’s hard to tell a miracle from a poke in the eye. This uncertainty is one of the things that most interest Kershisnik. “I’m thrilled by things I don’t understand,” he says. “I work on metaphors puzzling even to me.”
Kershisnik has spent much of his life in Utah, a state where rain falls infrequently but hard. But he travels widely, and on a recent trip to Wales he encountered a place where rain can fall every day for months. What struck him was the contrast between something so unusual, so potentially catastrophic, that the business of life stops for it, and how the same thing can be an ordinary fact that must be incorporated into each day’s activities.
The result was a metaphor he worked into several new paintings: gardening in the rain. While he leaves the interpretation to the viewer, the rain can surely stand for any adverse facts of existence, like the knowledge of our mortality. Or perhaps it represents the psychological effects of such knowledge, or the confidence that comes from believing in deliverance from adversity: the company of friends and family, or belief in the hereafter—either way, the springing-up of hope.
Gardening in the Rain is one of the most popular, sought-after images among the estimated 1,500 he’s made in just over 20 years. In the years to come, it will join a growing portrait, its many individual images like frames from a motion picture, of what our lives look like in this place, in our own time.
Geoff Wichert has written about art for periodicals in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia for 30 years. He currently teaches writing at Snow College and divides his time between the Sanpete Valley and the Wasatch Front, enjoying the natural backdrop that nourishes art in both places.
