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The Ordinary Truth, a novel by Jana Richman

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In a tense moment near the climax of The Ordinary Truth, a woman in her seventies wades across a rocky creek in a remote forest in the dark of night. As she feels her way, her senses heightened by danger, she conjures for readers the feeling of finding their way in the dark by the touch of their toes. They discover they can remember a tactile experience they consciously overlooked when it happened, preferring instead to navigate by sight. It’s a bravura scene, first for the contrast between her life-threatening struggle to cross a few feet of shallow water, and the ease with which her eager dog happily runs back and forth across the same distance. How did humans ever become so alienated from the natural world in which other animals remain so fully imbedded? At the same time, more subtly yet even more profoundly, the reader’s response proves that we can learn something and know it without conscious awareness, yet be capable of discovering its indelible trace—of ‘remembering’ it—later. This is important, because the very credibility of the story four narrators, from three generations of a single Nevada ranching family, are telling us hinges on just such a recovery into consciousness of an apparently lost memory.

The title of Jena Richman’s novel echoes that of another, very different book. Yet what concerns her here is not all that different from Al Gore’s motives for writing An Inconvenient Truth. Where Richman’s novel is thin on statistics with which to build an argument, her narrative account of the impact of climate change on those that live in the worst affected areas—human and animal alike—is an emotional prophecy of what lies in store for all of us. If twentieth century literature began with James Joyce arguing that art must transfix the viewer aesthetically and not evoke action, twenty-first century arts, literature included, have taken the opposite approach, seeking to galvanize opinions and modify behaviors. Both Richman and her publisher, Torrey House Press, vocally equate their literary and environmental concerns. Furthermore, in remarks made outside their books, both have argued that their concern for local issues, like drought in the west, should not be seen as parochial; if they don’t quite quote the writer’s advice, to ‘write what you know,’ they implicitly invoke the artist’s right to use local experiences to make universal points.

The Ordinary Truth tells the story of life in Eastern Nevada’s Spring Valley, where a handful of local ranchers live a good life of hard work, and have more in common with their peers across the line in south-west Utah than either has with the majority population dwelling in distant, crowded cities. Yet it opens not on the Baxter Ranch, its primary scene, but 300 miles away, on the 22nd floor of an office building in Las Vegas. The first narrator to introduce herself is Kate, prodigal daughter who left the ranch to attend college, studied natural resources, and now works for the Nevada Water Authority, charged with allocating too little water among too many thirsty citizens. The conflicts she faces are intractable, the justifications labyrinthine, the consequences life and death. Kate’s response is to flee, at least in her mind:

I’ll be sitting in my corner office–like I’m doing now–tinted glass from floor to ceiling, watching the sun drop behind the boxy horizon of Las Vegas skyscrapers and anticipating the neon dawn of evening, when for no good reason an image of my father will appear. A cloud, a shadow, a reflection, and there he is relaxed forward in the saddle atop Moots, his palomino gelding, arms crossed over the horn, looking amused to find himself surrounded by glass and steel. Moots stands lazily, his long-lashed lids drooping over soft brown eyes, one leg bent back so my father tilts slightly to the right. Dad holds an easy smile and seems as if he has something to tell me.

Kate is a forty-six year-old woman who, on first encounter, reveals she has never gotten over her first two loves: her father and horses. Both will prove central to the unfolding story, as will the wisdom and courage of Richman’s decision to tackle such clichés head-on. Understanding the conflict that underlies The Ordinary Truth will require getting beneath not only what readers may think they know about the dichotomies of modern life, but getting past the self-serving myths propagated by those who live it without curiosity or understanding. The alternative to Kate’s predicament is introduced by Leona, her mother’s brother’s wife:

Sometimes, when a spring day turns unexpectedly warm and the house feels like an unrinsed plastic milk jug lying in the sun, I set a lawn chair in the fine dirt under the budding cottonwoods on the west side a the working pens and ponder the perplexities a life.

‘Ona,’ as she is known, is a font of such colorfully metaphoric speech. An outsider who married in, she stands apart as the only modest member in a family of free spirits. She has also been in the best place to witness the consuming drama—a violent death and its consequences—that is constantly invoked but never addressed by the entire Jorgensen clan. Her husband, Nate, doesn’t get to tell his story, since all the narrators are women, but he’d probably say that anything he might add would already be covered by his wife and by Kate’s mother, his sister Nell:

A deeply rutted lane leans to the crick that flows between the alfalfa fields and the foot a the Snake Mountains. I caused the ruts by bringing the tractor up from the lower field in a rainstorm. I make a mental note to come out and grade the lane, but I’ll probably never get it done. I’m low on follow-through these days.

Nell’s no-nonsense way of taking things on herself exemplifies the way character can become fate. While Kate’s position with the water authority focuses their conflict, Nell’s iron will drives it. Their mother-daughter struggle is another timeless cliché, spilling over onto Cassie, Kate’s daughter, Nell’s grand-daughter, and the one narrator necessarily more concerned with the present and future than with the past. The bond between grandparents and grandchildren—so often easier than that between parents and children—has drawn Cassie deep into the chasm dividing Nell and Kate. Still in school, barely in her twenties, she combines a twenty-first century, post-Earth Day sense of urgency about her environmentally-threatened future with a fierce, idealistic determination to salvage what she can of her troubled family. She has a plan for doing this, and while it doesn’t work out as intended, her efforts broaden the scope of the novel before finally bringing about a resolution she could never have imagined.

In a sense, the rift that lies buried in the Jorgensen family’s history is an old-fashioned, literary symbol for something far more fragile that lies buried under their land: an ancient aquifer, a layer of spongy rock that has accumulated thousands of years of sparse local rainfall, into which distant populations have decided to drill. In the novel, and in real life, their plan to use this water in ways present supply cannot support awaits only completion of a 300-mile pipeline, already under construction. The politicians’ view this water as a resource that does no one any good where it is, and can give them a few years relief before a hoped-for, permanent solution comes along . . . or they leave office and someone else inherits the problem.

The error in the city-dweller’s thinking is clear to the ranchers of Omer Springs, who however lack the political means to resist. They owe their vulnerability to their own misjudgment, having been seduced away from supporting the liberal politicians who brought other agricultural regions the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Grand Coulee Dam, railroads, highways, price supports, free water, and so on. Listening to the ranchers of Spring Valley happily mock ‘the Liberals,’ older readers may recall how so many westerners traded their votes for the bait-and-switch promises of the Sagebrush Rebellion, a consortium of corporate-scale ranches, farms, and mines that spoke of wanting the same things the families wanted, but turned out to want it all for themselves.

Meanwhile, Kate’s idealistic hope that the pipeline will help, not hurt the situation, is mocked by the man in the next office, Matt, whom she’s known since both were graduate students in geology. She’s watched his idealism wither in the face of adult responsibility, his insight that ‘the growth of greed and gluttony skids to a halt when the water stops flowing’ gradually replaced by the despair of a bedrock recognition of human venality and self-serving thoughtlessness. ‘Most people,’ he characteristically observes, ‘hold tight to the belief that the origin of water is the faucet.’ Perhaps the only significant character in the book who is not fooling himself is Skinny, the Navajo hired hand who, in the book’s penultimate paragraph, packs his possessions into his truck and discreetly takes off. Nell’s comment, ‘Going home,’ almost aches with ambiguity.

In fact, it is the primary characteristic of all the major characters in The Ordinary Truth that they can spout wisdom and insight and proffer good advice to each other, and do so on almost every page, yet they cannot seem to see their own predicaments nearly so clearly or follow their own sage advice. Whether that annoys you or breaks your heart will depend on whether you view humanity as the victims, or the perpetrators, of their fate.

The Ordinary Truth, trade paperback ISBN: 978-1937226-06-0, published November 2012 by Torrey House Press, $16.95, 302 pages.

A bee at work in the cherry blossoms

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For an essayist and fishing enthusiast, popular U of U writing professor Maximilian Werner’s didn’t do badly with Crooked Creek, his first novel. Nominated for the Utah Book Award, it went up against In This Light, a collection of short stories by Melanie Rae Thon, his colleague at the U and one of Utah’s more distinguished living authors. That two such worthy books came along in time to compete with each other speaks to the strength of the local writing community at a time when literature itself is said to be in crisis. Placing Werner’s secular worldview beside Thon’s more spiritual vision also brought his view of life into high relief. It’s no secret that Utah has been a place of insiders and outsiders since its beginnings a century and a half ago, but it’ never been entirely clear who fits in which group. If Crooked Creek shows a diverse immigrant population that began winnowing itself from the beginning, Gravity Hill, Werner’s new memoir, reveals that the fault line cuts deeper, while running in more and different directions, than the simplistic, popular image would have us believe.

To chart so many fractures requires a variety of maps, or in this case, voices. Werner opens, closes, and paces Gravity Hill in the present, when he is a husband, father, and as fully enrolled in those tasks as any conventional family advocate. In those moments, his musings are literate and philosophical: ‘The sound of parenthood is the sigh,’ he reflects while attending a sleepless baby. But the timeline is complex, drawn by the gravity of memory to return in seemingly desultory fashion to those moments that, if not exactly traumatic, are troubling: moments he would as soon forget, but cannot. The voice shifts with the narrator’s age, adopting a conversational tone appropriate to a teenager. At times demotic, soaring, elegiac, street, the shift can be disorienting, as the audible surface of this elegant man-of-letters in his forties suddenly dissolves and the 16-year-old horny, thirsty boy steps forward to continue his story, frequently needing to prove himself by cursing in a rough, but finally harmless way. Rude speech is accompanied by direct description of carnal acts, reproof to anyone who thinks vague, allusive writing is somehow ‘poetic’ when, in reality, it is only vague and allusive.

Any man who writes a memoir must have in mind his background and education, how and perhaps why he came to some place in time. Maximilian Werner’s Gravity Hill offers such a record, tuned to the precise details of adolescence in Utah, though complete with excursions to distant places that variegate his experience. The book is also, in keeping with recent trends in memoir, a potentially universal, possibly inspirational tale of one young man’s descent into self-medication and substance abuse, followed by, if not the secret of his recovery, at least the facts of his survival. But there is something larger here: something that makes this book indispensable for anyone in Utah who is not LDS, and equally so for anyone who is. Gravity Hill may well be the first book to recollect in tranquility, without an agenda, the ongoing encounter between two peoples who still refer to each other by incidentally disparaging names: Mormons and Gentiles. Werner tells of living alongside a powerful yet defensive group of people he views neither as angels nor demons, but mostly as his neighbors. This may be the first time two groups who demonize each other in print and speech, though mildly by world standards, will see depicted how they behave together in actual practice.

But first, Max Werner is a boy from a broken home, one of two sons and a daughter being raised by their mother in the suburban towns of Salt Lake, loosely scattered around a basin closed in by rugged mountains and harsh deserts, where secrets are hard to keep and the great western ethic, the right to be left alone, long ago succumbed to the fundamentalist practice of minding one another’s business. Culture, as he discovers when he encounters ways different from his own, doesn’t change people, nor really form them. What culture does is preserve the enduring—if not just intractable—values of a group. What recent immigrants to Utah like Werner find themselves facing is not a community created by revelation. In fact, as he points out, the Saints’ command of theology looks shaky to non-believers, and the LDS Church plays no direct part in Gravity Hill. What young Werner finds instead is a strongly bonded, distinctively rural culture that is conservative in the old-fashioned sense: like common folk the world over, Latter Day Saints are devoted to maintaining the norms and mores that have preserved them far longer than the relatively brief history of their church. Having survived the enclosures of their hereditary lands, migration into the industrial revolution, and captivation in the urban slums of Europe, these pilgrims came to Zion in a desperate gamble to recover their own lost paradise. The last thing they wanted was to share it with the kind of losers they had barely escaped becoming themselves.

Young Max arrives on the scene with troubles of his own. His original family was not only broken, but the shards were twisted in ways that makes them difficult to see clearly. What connected his parents remains a mystery: his early memories find them already estranged, and most of his connection with his father occurs while shuttling back and forth between his mother’s domain in Utah and his father’s haunts in New York. Visiting his father brings him to Fire Island, revealed in some of the book’s most evocative and compelling passages: scenes too brief to satisfy the curious, but too suggestive for more cautious readers. Returning to his high school years in Salt Lake, he reveals himself to have been, like so many talented but poorly-directed youth, an indifferent student. The contrast between him and the future missionaries he encounter daily is at its strongest here: Werner and his friends fecklessly adrift, the young saints certain and self-confident. This is surely not where Gravity Hill will make trouble between Werner and his neighbors. What may cause offense is his insistence that adolescence, though a moveable feast, is none the less inescapable: that those assured young men and women on their way to elaborate weddings and large families are, beneath a cosmetic projection, just as much its creatures as are his friends. The desperate desire of returning missionaries to get married, an endlessly celebrated source of ribald humor in their community, may be disguised, but is no different in his eyes from the ceaseless cruising for sexual opportunities among their unchurched peers. Consider Faux, caught in conflict between her church and her peers, including an eager suitor Max considers hopeless:

Faux had reassessed and reasserted her commitment to all things Mormon. All her life she had been a tough crack to nut, and by God she would be so again. Thus there would be no more spreading of legs and she would surround herself with her own kind: the beautiful and visibly uncomplicated Mormon boys and girls. Of course Sport was not privy to any of this knowledge, and even if he were it would not have stopped him because it has never stopped anyone. He was a bee at work in the cherry blossoms.

If sexuality is the engine that drives Werner’s peers no matter their social standing, cars offer them a hazardous, demonstrably life-threatening independence. What cars don’t provide is that staple of earlier generations, the mobile bedroom. Among his friends, a room is never that hard to borrow. The draw for the rootless is Gravity Hill, a favorite spot to take a date or just to hang out. Here, in their four-wheel parlors, beneath the luminous State Capitol, yet on the edge of wilderness, they drink and talk—or more often, drink and sit silent—connect and separate again, and try to create the community that failed them in their home lives. The title refers to a section of road where an optical illusion makes a coasting car seem to accelerate uphill. Here Gravity Hill becomes a sublime metaphor, one that Werner sets up but does not belabor, for the way young adult men and women appear to be accelerating as they reach for marriage, families of their own, careers, and an apotheosis of accomplishment. The truth, of course, visible from some topographically objective vantage point, is that their primes are already past. Most, in reality, are actually rolling down into depths where they will be caught as if by gravity, trapped for the duration of life. Nor is there any reason to believe that, despite the superficial differences, the fate of the faithful will ultimately be any different.

When the warmish wind died we would look up again and gaze to the south, as if we expected to see something other than the black shapes of the rising mountains. We could see Bay and Brody silhouetted against the northern sky and their bodies were stiff and serious. Bay’s arms were folded. I think everyone knew they wouldn’t last. It wasn’t just them, though. We all had potential, but we lost most of it to the drugs and booze and to the resulting mistakes, which made me feel like I was always in the hole. Add that to the normal difficulty of interacting with other humans, and how any of us got and stayed together with anyone could be counted as one of life’s mysteries.

And yet some of them, as Maximilian Werner proves here, will come together and make it work. The flip side of young Werner’s insistence that his LDS classmates are just as addled by the onset of sex and mature society is his tacit admission that they had the right answer all along: sex within a union isn’t just necessary for successful reproduction; it provides the best template for living as well. Utah confounds outsiders, who don’t expect to find pre-Civil War values still practiced by politicians, financiers, civic leaders, intellectuals, teachers, editors, publishers, and writers of serious literature. But surely some of them will be just as bewildered to find the lost, intoxicated teen-ager they wrote off now representing them in a bid for earthly eternity. Gravity Hill argues no one has a patent on the truth, not insiders any more than the excluded, and nothing is what it looks like on TV. Werner promises no external help. He sees the lie that no one is ever tested beyond endurance for what it is. If the view is bleak, it’s one well-rooted in observable, and closely-observed, matters of fact.

On the left, the cover art for Gravity Hill, 'Natural History, was painted for the book by Bradford Overton, copyright 2012. On the right, the author.

On the left, the cover art for Gravity Hill, ‘Natural History,’ was painted for the book by Bradford Overton, copyright 2012. On the right, the author.

Alex Danchev’s CEZANNE

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Photo of Cezanne, a biography by Alex Denchev

Artworks can make visible the success of their makers, but to understand the struggles that produced them, and so the triumph they represented, something more is needed. Paul Cézanne was an artist who mastered his chops long before he was accepted by the gatekeepers, and the stories of his masterworks, and the fates that befell them, often prove powerfully moving. His ‘Portrait of the painter Achilles Emperaire,’ an image that, once seen, stays in the mind, expressed an abiding affection for a friend and fellow-worker, but its resemblance—possibly accidental, perhaps not—to a political scandal of the day consigned it to rejection and obscurity until long after both men were dead. Alex Danchev tells this story and many more in ‘Cézanne, A Life,’ a book that adroitly balances exhaustive documentation with narrative vitality and deeply-felt sympathy.

Portrait of Achille Emperaire

Cezanne’s portrait of his close friend, the painter Achille Emperaire, was completed in 1868

History tells us more about Paul Cézanne than it does about Shakespeare, the person whose significance as artist is so often invoked when discussing the ground-breaking painter. Yet in the years since Cézanne’s death just over a century ago, interest in the art maker has become as suspect as the virtue of beauty—an irrelevant and problematic distraction that shouldn’t be allowed to color responses to the works themselves. Still, the effort goes on to sort through the legends that grew up in the vacuum of hard evidence for either man. Alex Danchev has seemingly tracked down not only every qualified fact about his subject, but freshly translated every letter written by or to the artist, including some that were never sent. He’s also catalogued comments by relevant artists, critics, poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and even politicians. While it’s not true that the mundane events of Cézanne’s life get lost in all this data, the narrative thread often pops up unexpectedly from amid long summaries of sometimes contemporary, sometimes anachronistic observations and comments. In such moments, life events resemble so many painted under-painted highlights, or the notorious ‘empty’ spots Cézanne left open to let paper or canvas show through. This resemblance, between the writing and the art it presents, brings readers closer to the painter as art maker than seemed possible for the reclusive and famously irascible Cézanne.

Painting of a jug, a bowl with a handle, and fruit on a shelf

Among the works Cezanne is best known for are many still-life paintings. Objects in them often appear in other paintings, as Cezanne reused his materials and subjects.

The ideal approach to Cézanne is through his painting, but few in his audience have the skills to do so directly. Instead, we know him through the decidedly partisan account that makes up recent art history, according to which modern painting evolved through a single line, discernible only in hindsight. Thus a brief decade of impressionism broke the stranglehold of academic art, followed by a post-impressionist reaction that was led by Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Cézanne, among others. Yet Cézanne, who never met Van Gogh and was deeply offended by Gauguin, found his closest friend, ally, and influence in Pissarro. As this book shows, they all considered themselves at one time to be impressionists, and differed as much as anyone in their opinions of each other. Of course history is more art than science, and historians use many tools to blend and smooth the welter of irreconcilable data they confront—just as most painters do to unify the surface of their canvas. As biographer, Danchev moves in the other direction—from the general era to the specific individual—and restores details the historian must omit to make events fit the desired shape. His previous biography, of George Braque, was called a junk house of notes by one reviewer, and at times he seems to have done too well the task of giving the notoriously self-mystifying Cézanne back the thickets and brambles of his strange life. Yet as Danchev’s somewhat desultory campaign demolishes one myth after another about his character and how he painted, there gradually emerges a far more approachable figure, more convincingly depicted. Once-inexplicable mysteries give up at least some of their secrets. The woman who was his model, companion, the mother of his son, and eventually his wife emerges from the disparaging image created by her natural enemies and begins to display the positive, even intriguing traits he saw in her. The fate of his friendship with Emile Zola similarly shrugs off decades of misinterpretation, jealousy on more than one part yielding to the authentic, heart-breaking consequences on love of life’s accidents.

Cezanne's still life of three human skulls on a table

Among the unusual subjects Cezanne favored in his still-life works were human skulls.

In the end, Cézanne became convinced he came too soon, that he belonged not in his generation, but more properly among the young painters who made the pilgrimage to meet him in the last decade of his life. But he was wrong. In his artistic project, which he could never put in words, and which Danchev pursues through its influence on some of the great minds of the subsequent century, he anticipated aesthetic and scientific discoveries still working their way through human understanding, and others still being made. He overthrew the primacy of drawing before the application of color, undermined the five hundred-year tradition of linear perspective, and brought to the fore the equivalence of painting to any other form of direct perception:

Typically, Cézanne is not daubing, but LOOKING. In (poet Rainer Maria) Rilke’s parlance, he is stamping the visible into himself . . . . as the photographs show, he was always intensely present, his eyes glued to a tree trunk or a lump of earth, as he put it. (338)

At the core of the Cézannian revolution is a decisive shift in the emphasis of observation, from the description of the thing apprehended to the process of apprehension itself. Cézanne insisted that he painted things as they are, for what they are, as he saw them. The issue is what he saw—how he saw. ‘He never wanted to let the logic of the painting take precedence over the continuity of perception,’ argued (artist and critic) John Berger: ‘after each brushstroke he had to re-establish his innocence as perceiver.’ But perceptual innocence was a chimera. Cézanne’s late painting testifies to his recognition that fanatic attentiveness did not yield any greater clarity or immediacy. On the contrary, long fixation led to perceptual disintegration. The harder he looked, the more he became aware of dispersion, dissolution, destabilization . . . doubt. After 1900, as (Lawrence) Gowing noted, ‘separable physical objects in Cézanne’s work increasingly merge into the flux of color.’ (339)

Distant view of Mont Sainte-Victoire

Cezanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire dozens of times.

And of course what a painter discovered at the dawn of the twentieth century must also be true for a biographer working at the dawn of the twenty-first. Credit, then, to Alex Danchev, in whose manageably-sized tome (373 pages, plus a wealth of illustrations in color and b&w and, for those so inclined, excellent notes and sources) Paul Cézanne does not disintegrate, but like the subjects of his paintings, becomes more solid, more real, and his image more expressive of nature. Until today, no one knows for sure how Cézanne was able to capture fragmentary reality without losing its materiality in the process. No words can describe or explain it, but ‘Cézanne, A Life’ does show how it’s done.

The studio Cezanne built for himself late in his life.

Cezanne’s last studio, a place of pilgrimage for his fellow artists while he lived, and for art lovers ever since.

Michael Frayn’s novel, Skios, like all this writer’s works, transcends the humor that has made him so popular to deliver a scalpel-sharp vision of the human condition

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From the Renaissance on, the theme of history has been expansion: the Age of Exploration carrying adventurers and map-makers to every corner of the globe; the Reformation replacing a monolithic church with religious diversity; philosophy yielding to ideology; capitalism finding the price of everything while liberating us from obligation to its value. This expansion seemed on course to go on forever, like the post-Big Bang universe. But lately, one thing has begun to shrink. That would be us. Now every day brings news of scientific breakthroughs that diminish nature’s only witness. Our senses don’t reliably inform us, nor do we wait on them as we thought we did for the wherewithal to make choices. How could we ever really know each other, when we don’t know ourselves?

Michael Frayn is the poet laureate of this collapse. Or perhaps its ‘clown prince.’ A number of literary authors have taken on themes like the mind’s preference for a good story instead of reason, and how those stories are undermined by narrative unreliability. But no one else handles the impact of technology on the scaffolding of knowledge and the human desire for certainly with Frayn’s scathing humor. Most of us like to laugh; all of us need to. Some prefer to laugh at things falling about, while others require the witty insight that eviscerates appearances. Frayne offers it all in generous helpings.

Those who enjoy stage farce—mistaken doors and misplaced assignations—may remember Frayn from Noises Off, the best-known of his fifteen stage plays and the masterpiece and template of these juggling acts, in which any number of characters, plots, and subplots are kept suspended in chaotic misadventures. Those who prefer an art-historical context, whether Donna Leon’s Venice or Steve Martin’s Soho, might recall Headlong, one of Frayn’s ten novels, where he unspools a solution to one of the most exquisite mysteries in all art. It’s a mark of his skill that Frayn, almost alone among writers, is at the top of his class both on stage and between pages. In Skios, he’s merged his genres and their antithetical strengths. Readers watch the action play out before them as if on stage, but are privy to the characters’ intentions, confusion, and false certainties. More, we are granted insight into alternative possibilities: roads not taken that branch out even beyond the spaghetti bowl of conflicting motives and snarled misunderstandings.

Skios is a Greek island (not a collection of Swiss sports enthusiasts) to which the Fred Toppler Foundation invites intellectuals, culturati, magnates, and their various accompanists. It’s a stew that turns even the most hardened professional amateur on some level. The guest of honor at the Foundation’s annual gathering has gone astray, lost like checked luggage, and been replaced by someone hoping to escape his life’s consequences and start over. But old consequences trail him, and new ones defeat all efforts to sort out the confusion. Frayn’s x-ray vision lights the way down to the level of actual luggage, passports, and the indispensables we take for granted. But nothing can be taken for granted in Skios, amid an ensemble of faked ruins concealing a greater, un-ruined truth that could easily be lost to the foibles of those who set themselves up as its defenders.

In This Light is nominated for the Utah Book Award

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The cover of In This Light, Melanie Rae Thon's short story collection

In This Light, University of Utah English Professor and award-winning author Melanie Rae Thon’s most recent story collection, brings together works from a quarter century of her writing, thus becoming in effect a cross section of her artistic development. It begins with two of her early stories, which are accessible if almost too transparently structured. Four from her second collection show her in transition toward what emerges in three recent stories. Here the expository clarity of her early work disappears beneath what may strike readers as either an encompassing, spiritual vision, or an awesome rush of discursive language meant to conceal the impossibility of finding comfort in this world.

The opening story, Iona Moon, presents the author at her most accessible. Taking place during a few weeks either side of the end of high school—as nearly universal a transition as exists today—it follows the title character as she moves between two boys: the lying one who beds (or back seats) her before he abandons her, and the honest one who refuses to do either. Like all Thon’s stories, it’s rich in details of period and locale. From her mother Hannah, Iona has learned to treasure a farmer’s pre-dawn tasks, done ‘In the lightless peace God made before he made the day.’ Willy objects that her soiled shoes make his car smell like a barnyard, but then Willy has already learned to accept what he cannot change. His father, named after Andrew Johnson, the president who gave up what Abraham Lincoln had sacrificed so much for, wanted to be an attorney, but became a dentist out of necessity: one who argues like a lawyer, augmented by Biblical blacks and whites. Willy’s mother trained as a cosmetologist, but in tiny, claustrophobic White Falls also works for the undertaker, salvaging the ruined beauty of teenage children killed by the cars they thought would liberate them. Only Jay, the wealthy boy and so the least worthy of the three, may escape the slow death of high school aspirations. But if he is blessed by circumstances, we can be certain he will waste this advantage. All this is less schematic than it sounds, but by the end, Iona has glimpsed how the dignity of the tasks she cherishes will turn to unwelcome drudgery once the pattern sets and there are no more options. In a story full of rich language, one line is repeated: Hannah’s ‘I think I’ve got to have some pleasure,’ comes back to Iona, an apparition that threatens to break her heart.

From the beginning, Thon has avoided the narrow story, so like an obstacle course, in which the hero threads a narrative path among colorful characters, letting behavior reveal what it can about them. Instead, she tells us what we need to know, in stories that are intricately woven, dense with tangential inferences, like sparks that fly off to shed brief, revealing light on each person or predicament. Perhaps their foremost quality is resonance: the sympathetic vibration of one thing to another within the story, and beyond it, between them and us. From story to story, the number and richness of these centrifugal glimpses increases, gradually compressing events at the core beneath a mantle of emotional and spiritual significance, until in Tu B’Shvat, the apotheosis-like concluding story, a single event—the unexplained death by drowning of a young woman at a community exercise pool in Salt Lake City—becomes the catalyst that illuminates not only the dead woman’s family and her connection to the Holocaust, but the penetration, by hers and the narrator’s families, of a new world that continues to challenge and, ultimately, exalt them. Revelations tumble forth. Thon foregrounds two types of humanity: the mass of worthy, yet disenfranchised figures who suffer, and the sensitive few who come alive in the act of perceiving the inner lives of the voiceless, extending those lives by acts of memory. Eventually, the difference between remembering the dead and keeping them alive is lost, and what matters becomes a mystical property that moves between bodies like the breath they share, like the shadow of one falling on another.

Readers content to read modern stories written in the confident manner of Jane Austen or Mark Twain may want to stop reading now. Or we could talk about subjective, technical flaws not everyone objects to. Thon recounts dreams, a device never all that convincing, but one further discredited in the age of Cognitive Science. If she doesn’t actually use the second person, she comes close in her characters’ tendency to address the reader. She sometimes stretches her faith that aesthetics can justify even the most wasted life, until the surface of the story becomes translucent, her implied lessons showing through like the silhouette behind a screen. Her enthusiasts might counter that such cavils pale beside the sure-footed way Thon navigates stories far beyond her experience, transporting readers into the presence of, and even inside, strange beings who turn out to be more like us than seemed possible. Those who enjoy stories that spell out moral truths will appreciate Punishment, set before the civil war though told long after, in which Selina is saved from what befell her Irish maid—becoming her widowed father’s concubine—when Selina’s father chooses one of his slaves instead. Selina’s subsequently blighted life can be seen as the price of her deliverance, symbolic of the impact of sin on slave and master alike.

These are traditionally-structured stories of characters and the incidents that befall them. Beneath lie vast swaths of research. Write what you know was supposed to be the writer’s rule, but who ever knew enough? The vivid, convincing details of the lives of Thon’s cast of characters—Indians, commercial travelers, alcohol and drug abusers, sexual predators, thieves, drivers, doctors and nurses, hitchhikers, mothers, fathers, children becoming adults, corpses—come from sources the author tracked-down, and are brought to life by skillful refashioning and eloquence. She’s like the rare painter who works from well-learned facts of anatomy and perspective. Unlike in life, here events are never without meaning and significance. In Father Lover Deadman Dreamer, a father and son go hunting, but the man accidentally kills his own son, then in despair shoots but fails to kill himself. Ada, who calls herself a born liar like her mother, recalls the story again and again, an absurd event become meaningful as a gauge to measure herself against.

In this kind of fiction, events are compressed until lives of quiet desperation become full of drama, danger, loss. Especially loss. In such a book, if there is a beautiful child who makes one want to live, it is that child who will die. If a woman opens her home to forty wild children, living without families in the woods, she will go to jail for the crimes she commits in order to feed them. But we could argue all day whether such mechanisms enrich reading or spoil it. What seems more important, more decisive, is whether such literature really works for us today, or if we’re just using it to pass the time while we wait for the books—or is it the readers?—we need. For many of us now, the omniscient narrator no longer carries authority. The recent turn to the first person reflects inability to believe any more in the omniscient voice that knows everything. But while Thon tells stories in the first person, her stories don’t remain in their tellers’ possession. They slide up and down a scale of being as easily as the living trade identities with the dead. This book might only be possible in the US, where the majority of potential readers profess a belief in some version of a deity. Such readers might be moved, shaken to their cores, terrified, and finally elevated by In This Light. Humanists, on the other hand, and those acquainted with world literature, are as likely to be disappointed by coming so close to the reality of human nature, with its strengths and weaknesses so adroitly balanced, only to find the same answers that have already failed to satisfy.
Melanie Rae Thon’s In This Light, published by Gray Wolf Press, is a finalist for the 2011 Utah Book Award for Fiction. Winners of the Utah Book Award will be announced Friday, October 5th.

Portrait of Melanie Rae Thon, the author of In This Light

Melanie Rae Thon photo credit Andi Olsen

Sandy Brunvand and Al Denyer at Kayo Gallery

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Familiarity with the technical processes that bring art works into being is a mark of sophistication, and some artists consider their methods as equal to subject matter in importance. Others know better, preferring the viewer ignore the smocked figure behind the curtain in order to focus on the thing visual images do best, which is bypass cognition and seemingly enter the flesh directly, evoking physical and emotional responses akin to those experienced in the direct presence of the thing depicted: humor, pathos, terror, awe—the sublime and the beautiful. Our modern emphasis on technique begins with Jackson Pollock, who has the distinction of having dethroned an ideal of art that had stood forever in favor of a new model that, when the novelty finally wore off, his own paintings prove to have been without basis in fact. His emphasis on the action of the artist, the flinging of paint in intentional accidents, seemed to prove what a century of artists had come to argue: that visual illusions and the sense of the presence of remote things were not actually necessary. This notion was so exciting to the audience sixty years ago that they failed to notice how many of the missing elements they were projecting into the work: space, perspective, hidden connections between discreet parts of the the image, rhythm, meaning. A drip painting turned out to represent a new subject, yes, but it relied on the same built-in impulses in the viewer that had served Van Eyck.

Sandy Brunvand and Al Denyer are familiar figures in Salt Lake. Each works in an artistic niche, a specialized corner of an art spectrum that, since the Renaissance, has seen few overall masters. Brunvand, a founder of Saltgrass Press, favors a graphic approach in which print is a raw material, rather than a final product. How marks are made is important to her, but she never forgets that in themselves marks are trivial; it is the many subtle ways they can signify that makes them interesting. Delicately drawn ink portraits, parts printed on rice paper, and common metal staples are punctuated by filigrees of sewn lines and dog hair. Although she works primarily in black and white, textures of marks and various kinds of paper combine to produce a subtle palette. She often draws on natural images, such as the living as well as dried plants she finds while walking in the hills. What begins with nature viewed up close becomes a cerebral landscape, composed not so much of vistas as symbolic echoes that play on the page like music in the mind.

Sandy Brunvand's hands are seen drawing in a close up left; Sandy Brunvand and Al Denyer stand together in the gallery during their show

Left: Sandy Brunvand’s hands as she works on one of her drawings. Right: Sandy (L) with a wall of her recent works behind, stands with her fellow artist, Al Denyer (R)

In many ways, Al Denyer mints the flip side of Brunvand’s coin. Instead of lines slicing a void to separate objects from space, Denyer’s dense gestures build presence by accretion, forming areas where perceptible marks disappear in favor of textures. Small differences, such as those between black graphite and black charcoal, become the syntax of a language made up of thousands of iterations. But where Brunvand wants us to be aware of the muscular gesture made by pen or pencil, Denyer deliberately loses these in a slowly evolving maelstrom of patterned signs. Her landscapes commence somewhere far beyond what we can see with the naked eye, in a remote corner of earth further estranged by being seen as if from a satellite in space. Yet they are instantly recognizable, or—more accurately—immediately mistakable for something infinitely mundane and familiar, like the pattern of veins and aureolas on a leaf, the lines on a relief map, the crazing on a glazed porcelain plate or an old oil painting. Most unnerving of all, they reflect—art as mirror—the intricate cellular structure of the very neural network of the brain at that moment contemplating them.

A drawing by Al Denyer of the Arctic as it might look from a satellite

Arctic VI, a colored pencil drawing by Al Denyer, reveals among other things the similarity of the earth’s surface, pleated by gargantuan forces, to a carelessly thrown blanket.

Brunvand and Denyer have much in common: two women, close in age, who enrich their vocational experience by teaching at the U of U. But it is their differences, one guesses, that allowed them to overcome a competitive environment and become friends who eventually chose to exhibit together. Looking back at their recent exhibits, it’s clear that each has been cultivating her personal garden. Yet another way of putting it is that each of them has arrived at a personal method and style that together create a voice: a distinct and unmistakeable visual character, in which guise she presents a body of works that have as much resonance with each other as they do with their sources in the natural world. In an era where artists are expected to break the mold each time out, what hangs on the walls at Kayo may not look like breakthroughs, but they are the latest, if not the last, cumulative additions to a process whereby an artist’s works gradually change their nature as they modify first how we see them, and then how we see everything else.

Two of Sandy Brunvand's drawings

The evolution of Sandy Brunvand’s drawings can be glimpsed in this side-by-side comparison of two out of what must be very many

In her statement, Sandy Brunvand cites the influence of conceptual artist Mel Bochner. She wants the viewer to be aware of her state of mind, and she takes the trouble to describe the importance of mark-making to the works shown here. It’s not just that without the marks, there would be no drawing: she wants us to envision her making a mark by a series of movements, then making another, and another, and to see how the momentum of these actions generates a force beyond her conscious control. Yet the result is anything but mechanical. The marks include lively, dancing smudges, and while the results are abstract cartoons, images arise from them. Like Jackson Pollock’s swirling nets of paint, her fields of marks critique, and ultimately undercut, Bochner’s theory. He asserted that the gallery wall is a proper subject matter for art, but apparently mistook the viewer’s attention for the artist’s; otherwise, his comment makes no sense. Meanwhile, just as my reference to Brunvand’s ‘field’ of marks lends them metaphorical weight, so our minds write visual metaphors over the two-dimensional grid before our eyes, turning them into ‘fields’ of vision, even if we’re not told what they signify precisely. Some of the dots appear in pairs, and depending on the distance from which they are viewed—their placement in the gallery permits a wide range—long, thin objects emerge into the foreground, their isolation suggested by the apparent shadows they cast behind. Viewed up close, these objects dematerialize and are replaced by a suggestion of individual particles moving in unique, yet similar patterns as though in response to larger forces, leaving trails like histories. Allusions to landscape supplied by the viewer’s imagination, but not prevented by the artist, spring to life. A path rises to meet a fence, a wave laps the rim of a vessel, a hill rises to meet a cloud. It’s not hard to imagine an artist committed to abstraction tearing her hair at such uninvited readings, but it’s also about time we admit that sophisticated viewers—and in this context every viewer is sophisticated—are acquainted with ironies like ambiguous marks that ‘say’ several things to us at once. Nor is it trivial that examining Brunvand’s visual playgrounds provoke muscular sensations that might also be caused by watching dancers. A surprisingly cheerful person who approaches her daily hikes as enthusiastically as her canine companion, her art works are upbeat souvenirs she eagerly shares.

A panorama of the gallery, with works by both artists visible

The Kayo Gallery space, with Sandy Brunvand’s work on the left and Al Denyer’s on the right.

Few artworks surpass Al Denyer’s at suggesting alternate readings. Skirting the line between drawing and painting, evenly balanced between scientific illustration and sensuous, textured fact, they stimulate curiosity even as their maker passively discourages speculation about her working method. She offers no statement, nor list of materials, nor accounting of techniques. Even their titles, names of geographic locales, are vague. ‘Yukon’ could as easily refer to a potato viewed under a microscope as a satellite image of permafrost. Even seen up close, it’s impossible to tell whether she works from light to dark or dark to light. Where these differ from previous works is the subtlety of tonality, achieving a palette so delicate as to be lost in photographs. Although they suggest—or permit the imagination to project into them—textures ranging from crushed fabrics to dried liquids, the artistic tradition that they seem most close to are Persian carpets, which are often displayed on walls. One sees the large pattern first, with its symmetry and rupture, with balance playing against animation. Closer, one begins to make out individual devices, which depending on the source may be specific objects or hieratic symbols. Stems and borders connecting the parts sprout their own ornaments. Finally, the individual tufts of wool or silk come into focus, like the texture of whatever underlies Denyer’s paint. No matter what it suggests, the pattern is stamped immediately and clearly on eye and mind.

A painting by Al Denyer of the crazed surface of the Arctic, as if seen from a satellite

Arctic 1, an oil painting on canvas, by Al Denyer. All photos are courtesy of the artists.

Conventional landscapes create an illusion of perspective, which means placing the viewer in a particular orientation with a dictated point-of-view. Denyer’s mandala-like images of the earth dis-orient the viewer, inviting contemplation without designation a center of attention or subordinating visual elements. Even a topographic feel for gravity and flow can’t privilege the eye’s movement uphill or down. Although common enough experiences in the real world, among their few precedents in art are . . . those drip paintings of Jackson Pollock. But where his squiggles expand confidently across the canvas, hers pucker, concentrating and conserving their energy. Artworks don’t require morals, and despite their aesthetic power, these works speak a subtle rhetoric befitting the reticent woman who made them. Nothing is as new, unique, special, or unprecedented as we’d like to think. And beauty doesn’t arise in a departure from averages. It’s all in how the norms are fulfilled.

Twelve Rooms of the Nile: book review

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Cover of the novel under discussion

Twelve Rooms of the NIle, a novel by Enid Shomer

Some literary critics resisted the relatively recent introduction of historical characters into fiction, while others cited such auspicious precedents as Napoleon’s appearance in War and Peace in its defense. The fictional purists lost the battle, and a trickle of novels like E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, in which Harry Houdini and Emma Goldman appeared beside completely made-up characters, became a flood in the era of Post-modernism. Eventually, literary figures old enough to be out of copyright were lifted too, so that the lives of beloved characters—suspended by their creators so that readers could imagine their own endings to the story—were spelled out for an audience that had lost its power to dream. In time, everyone from Elizabeth Bennet to Abraham Lincoln was busy fighting vampires, werewolves, or zombies. The perfectly-timed rise of the Internet, like the earlier invention of the camera, lowered the bar to the point where even books still in copyright became raw material for lesser writers to re-imagine, a trend that climaxed in the 50 Shades Trilogy, wherein the thinly disguised Twilight novels have their missing erotic dimension restored.

Such Mannerist characteristics as parody and rapid progress through genres have historically indicated the end of an era, a time when less ripe examples of the trend struggle for attention. That may explain the relative lack of attention for a far more interesting venture, Enid Shomer’s Twelve Rooms of the Nile. Based on a handful of Victorian journals and such surviving records as early Baedeker’s and similar primitive travel guidebooks, this novel imagines what might have happened during simultaneous forays among the antiquities lining the Nile River that were actually undertaken in 1850 by Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert. Where books that hijack fictional characters can change their stories any way they want, these events, early in two of the better-known 19th century lives, face far tighter strictures. The dates and itineraries of both are known, as are some events and details, but while nothing documents their encounter, neither does the record prohibit their having shared an adventure. The challenge for Shomer was to craft a story that fits the known facts and, instead of reconfiguring what these two remarkable figures subsequently achieved, sheds light on how they became who we know them to have been.

At first glance, Nightingale, the virginal icon of feminine service, and Flaubert, one of the most notorious libertines in a place noted for sexual indulgence, are an unlikely pair, and to her credit Shomer pulls no punches in presenting them. Flaubert, recently under the influence of a shallow spirituality, has spent years writing a book about St. Anthony that his friends consider so bad he should burn it, not rewrite it. His response has been to throw himself into sensuality as if there were no tomorrow. Nightingale, convinced of God’s plan for her, has declined to marry and spends her considerable energy seeking something that looks enough like a calling. Even their encounter, on a choked road, points up their differences: when a pair of intoxicated Frenchmen open fire on birds from a busy road, terrifying their fellow travelers, the quintessential English maiden censures them. Thus their story begins.

Ah, but our author sees these two young, talented persons more accurately than the iconic images that have come down to us. Just how they might appeal to each other, and what each brings to the table that the other is lacking to be great, and why their collision has remained secret, are the business of this story, ornamented with a meticulous reconstruction of Egypt at the dawn of its rediscovery, just as the Rosetta Stone was enabling the lost culture of the ancients to finally be understood. Clearly, Enid Shomer has written Twelve Rooms of the Nile as another kind of Rosetta Stone, to enable reconstruction of two remarkable persons who, no less than the civilization of Egypt, have been lost to us through a century of admiration for what they achieved.

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Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations. George Orwell

Being told that what I know is not welcome in the discussion makes me realize my contribution is not as futile as I had come to think. Time to stop doubting myself and get to work.

The Face of Utah Sculpture

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In an interview he gave Jennifer Napier Pierce prior to the opening of The Face Of Utah Sculpture, an annual exhibition he founded and curates, Dan Cummings explained why he considers this such an important opportunity for artists like him. ‘Sculptors’ he said, ‘don’t much get single shows.’ It’s true. Sculptors are typically invited to take part in two-person shows, where their work complements the work of a painter. To be seen clearly, paintings require empty rooms; sculpture insures the resulting space is not wasted. Thus the celebrated judgment of Barnett Newman: ‘A sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to get a look at a painting.’ But there is good reason as well why we, as audience, should see what Cummings has brought to the Cultural Celebration Center. Far from the display of challenging aesthetic statements that makes up many modern art shows, this one is immediately accessible and, in place of consternation, is more likely to generate feelings of pleasure, fun, and even exhilaration.

A carved and painted gourd suggests a tangle of rope

In Rope, Marilyn Sunderland cuts away the thin material, paradoxically making it appear more substantial.

Anyone who thinks artists work best in garrets, away from interference by the public, can learn something from the example of Marilyn Sunderland. A few years ago, her painted gourds brought to mind folk arts. Although she selected the gourd as a painter selects a grade and shape of canvas, the final product resembled classroom design practice: fit the image to the 3D shape. Interaction with her peers and the public has opened up her approach, literally: in The Rope she cuts away the negative space between coils of illusionistic cordage carved in bas relief, revealing the solid-looking gourd to be a thin, hollow skin. Paradoxically, the more she reduces the solid-looking ellipsoid to a surface of lace, the more solid the representation appears. The gourd’s shape disappears, demonstrating the dimensional alchemy underlying all visual art. Rope connects thematically with Looking At An Object I’ll Never Understand, one of Cummings’ fused and carved glass pieces, in which a black-and-white checkerboard resembles water into which stones are thrown, the surface roiling into ornaments suggesting a computer animation of a mathematical equation. Another glass artist, Andrew Kosorok, uses the translucence of flat glass to model the dimensions of space, demonstrating the notion shared among the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions that spirit first creates, and then infuses, everything.

A black and white checkerboard, made of squares of glass, is carved into an ornamental relief

Dan Cummings Looking At An Object represents some of the perils of doing just that.

It sometimes seems the three dimensions of sculpture impose more limits on an artist than do the two of painting, but contrasting representations of the human form argue that the range of possibilities in sculpture is as wide as the artist’s vision. Julie Lucus opens up the torso in Nevermore, where her signature mosaic tiles suggest the stone walls of a prison or a fortress, a suggestion underscored by the presence of barred windows behind the occupant, who dwells close to the heart. Emily de la Cruz Ellis takes an opposing view in Don’t Look Back in Anger. Obdurate and opaque, her sandstone blocks lie silent on the floor, denying entry and suggesting John Donne was wrong: everyone is an island, no one can be known. But Brian Christensen’s Blue Note gets it right. Our own knowledge and experience allow us to decipher the features of his standing female figure, who proffers us the crystal she holds in her hand as though it were the key to her sorrow. The ruined piano mechanism that frames her and carves out her space, stopping our eyes from straying, suggests another kind of passageway: the evocative art of music, tinted with aural color the way her skin carries the shifting hints of pigment. Like sounds, appearances can carry something essential between us. There are conduits by which we can know and—sculpture being supremely tactile—touch one another.

Roughly squared blocks of limestone suggest a human body lying on the floor

Emily de la Crus Ellis urges viewers: Don’t Look Back in Anger

No survey of 3-D art could be complete without a few examples of trompe-l’oeil, in which the sculptor displays his skill by fooling our eyes. In effect, such illusions argue that touch remains more reliable than its more popular, more glamorous, and more successful long-distance version: vision. Relegated long ago to the status of stunt, trompe-l’oeil made a comeback when Jasper Johns rendered mundane beer cans in painted bronze, those transformative and supposedly ennobling materials. Perfectly illusionistic tours de force followed, including leather goods made of clay and a motorcycle carved from wood. Darwin Dower also chose wood, but a more homely and more challenging array of subjects. Restoration: A Divine Calling reveals what a desktop was before the computer undertook to steal its identity and displace so many once-familiar things. Among the objects and materials it ‘restores’ are leather bindings, printed paper pages, spectacles, a candle, and the compound paraphernalia of handwriting: a feather quill, an inkstand with cover, a blotter, and a bit of foolscap displaying a fine hand. There can be a fine line between pleasure and frustration, and as the eye wanders along the ragged edges of well-worn paper pages, the mind crosses back and forth between the imaginary pleasure of turning over those pages and the frustration of knowing it to be impossible.

A typical desktop of two hundred years ago is actually carved entirely from wood

A classic composition on a desktop, each part of which was carved from wood and painted by artist Darwin Dower

In the same way, the limit of art is also what makes it indispensable. Only in our imaginations can we go where these works take us, or make us want to take ourselves. Not every one of the 70 works by 40 artists assembled here will succeed for everyone, but each is a potential launching pad for a trip into real things and their imaginary connections. Instead of selecting a narrow range of objects meant to prove a point, The Face of Utah Sculpture assumes that if it includes the wide range of competent work, viewers can sort them out. You don’t have to like them all, but if Andrea Heidienger’s cast-paper cityscape is not to your liking, perhaps Randy Chamberlain’s bronze bald eagle in the form of a scythe will do. But take a second look at the things you first want to dismiss: therein lies the key to personal growth.

A melancholy bronze face conveys a woman's mood

A close-up detail of Brian Christensen’s Blue Note, in which unheard music and an untold personal history become known to us by the alchemy of an installation

Drawing Together

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For some time now I’ve been thinking about something that, in the privacy of my mind, I call ‘the Utah School.’ This assortment of local artists—their precise number varies—display common concerns and make similar choices in their works: sufficiently so that a curious critic might look for some shared influence beyond the obvious. Unlike the Cubists, but like the Impressionists and Fauves, these artists have in no way unilaterally identified themselves as sharing particular tastes or strategies. They remain so far a phenomenon that primarily exists only in a critic’s eyes. So when rumors of collaboration between two of the primary candidates for Utah School membership—Cassandra Barney and Brian Kershisnik—reached my ears, they pricked up. On the one hand, this could be the first signs of something emerging. On the other hand, it could be just two artists who know each other’s work and are looking for a new outlet; art, after all, is also a business. I felt I needed to get over to the Kayo Gallery’s new space (next door to their old digs near the corner of East Second and Broadway), where Drawing Together, twenty-five of their collaborative, mixed-media drawings, is on display through August 11. The title alone is provocative: it could be a literal description of what took place, or it could be a gentle pun. Either way, it opens possibilities for the future.

Dates for the onset of Modernism run all the way from 1200 to 1940. Modern visual arts arguably begin to take shape around 1850, contemporary with the invention of photography. The bath water of elaborately hand-made, extreme realism that was thrown out then has been followed since by many babies, including beauty, skill, discernment, and good taste. Another of the victims was collaboration between artists. It’s ironic to hear critics talk about how ‘huge’ today’s artworks are, as if St. Peter’s in Rome hadn’t been the world’s largest building, or Angkor Wat didn’t occupy over 200 acres. If anything, the slow growth in size of today’s art is testimony to the gradual disappearance of the shibboleth against collaboration. But of all the art media, the last ones to permit artists to work together are the most intimate, including of course drawing.

There were some negative comments about what finally showed up on the walls at Kayo: comments focusing on the fact that what’s here are ‘just drawings.’ While it’s true that as finished works of art, drawings are perceived as lesser works than the paintings they may turn into, there are several qualities that make these more compelling. First of all, because of their ‘skeletal’ condition, the contribution of each artist shows up more clearly, and viewers who know them individually can gain insight into how each proceeds from a given stage to a necessary next step. For another, even a professional who views their works regularly can be fooled into seeing more similarity than actually exists. Seeing Barney and Kershisnik in the same frame makes it impossible to overlook their differences. And studying just how they found to work together says something about how their works normally take shape.

Apparently, there was little conversation and no overt planning between the two artists. Rather than hammer out an idea that they then executed, each began by drawing on a blank sheet of paper. At some point, those sheets were exchanged. Sometimes one left a space in the composition for the other to fill. At others, a sketch centered on the page was handed off, possibly for the addition of a background or other details. In any case, differences remain that would almost certainly have been smoothed over during the many hours it takes to take a painting to a finished state.

Among the most popular prints of M.C. Escher is one of two elaborately-rendered, illusionistic hands poised side by side, each holding a stylus with which it is adding the line-drawn, preliminary version of the other’s wrist. Escher’s version takes its cue from the yin-yang figure: both hands are identical but reversed with respect to each other. Barney and Kershisnik, perhaps inevitably, made several drawings on the same theme, but with each drawing the other’s figure. While the idea may seem obvious, a philosopher could have a field day with the possibilities: one artist could draw both, combining a self-portrait and a portrait; each artist could draw a self-portrait; each artist could draw a portrait of the other. Since the subject could be the way I would draw it, or it could be the way I think my collaborator would, the number of possibilities is at least doubled. To me, it appears that the large drawing contains two self portraits; in the smaller one, I think we have Barney by Kershisnik and vice-versa. Anyone else care to venture a guess?

This is one case where familiarity with the artists’ biographies can help see their differences. Cassandra Barney comes from an arts background. During childhood she was regularly exposed to art museums. Her trajectory was from child of artist to an artist in her own right. Her work reveals a trained hand in the way the varying weight of her sinuous line renders three-dimensional information, or the Leonardo-like angles she likes for posing a head. Brian Kershisnik’s background, comparatively speaking, was that of a layman. Although he did turn to the formal study of art in college, his trajectory since has been opposite to the academic tradition that Barney may not actively pursue, but cannot entirely expunge. In other words, while one of the characteristics of the Utah School might be an affinity for Byzantine-style, weightless figures, Barney’s figures rest lightly on the ground, while Kershisnik’s tend to float, as though indifferent to gravity. His line is also far more architectonic than hers.

Once these cues are sorted out, it’s almost irresistible to imaginary narratives of how the final images came about. In point of fact, both these artists seem to enjoy hinting in their artworks that there are stories the images escaped from. In one large drawing, titled ‘Mom Is In a Hole,‘ Dad—a Kershisnik male—and Mom—a Barney woman—both eye an infant, him cautiously and her with rapture. The really interesting thing is that while he sits on a vague ground, she appears to be naked and buried up to her armpits. The remarkable thing is that the parts work so well together, as if a single mind had been in charge from the outset. Furthermore, if the precise visual reasoning is open ended, it’s no more so than might be expected from either artist working alone.

The difference between illustration and art is that, in the latter, the final goal isn’t known until it’s reached. This show might have proved the futility of artist’s collaborating, but in works like this, where the first mark has been followed by another, and another, until the unified, irresistible image appeared to first one, then the other artist, and now to anyone who cares enough to look, there is proof that collaboration, like collage, prepared ground, Exquisite Corpse, or any of a host of other techniques, is a valid way of making art.

Two drawn figures, a man and a woman, each figure seen completing the other

In this untitled multi-media drawing by Brian Kershisnik and Cassandra Barney, he draws her drawing him, and she draws him drawing her.