Kent Christensen's Secrets of the Great Salt Lake

Painter Kent Christensen's Secrets of the Great Salt Lake is a virtuosic piece of visual satire representing early Utah history. Brigham Young rides a dinosaur in the lake while two trains bringing Jell-O, Snelgrove's ice cream, donuts, and toxic waste meet at Promontory Point for the driving of the Golden Spike. The state's animals frolic among recognizable tourist landmarks even while their existence is imperiled by climate change. Derived, in part, by Bosch's masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights, Christensen's most complex painting yet is the topic of this episode along with a discussion of the purpose of satire, the relationships of illustration and fine art, and how a project that has taken 500 hours to create started.

Transcript

Glen Nelson:   0:00
Hello and welcome to another of the Center's Studio Podcast series. I'm your host, Glen Nelson. Today I'm talking to a prankster, a sneak, a trickster, a sleight-of-hand artist. And what a fine artist he is: Kent Christensen. I'm on high alert sitting in his studio. I'm surrounded by a delicious war of brilliant ideas, social satire, humor, beauty, and charm. Isn't that how everybody describes your work?

Kent Christensen:   0:49
Oh, yes. Especially someone who's known me as long as you have.

Glen Nelson:   0:52
Thanks for having me. And by "having" I mean hosting, not like having me for dinner or cutting me in half. In this interview, we're gonna try something different. I want to focus on a single...

Kent Christensen:   1:03
Or quarter.    

Glen Nelson:   1:03
What would that even mean? How would you choose my best quarter? In this interview, we're gonna try something different. I want to focus on a single painting and go into it in some depth. This may turn out to be a completely terrible idea, but for now, let's dispatch your bio in three sentences. You ready? Kent is an artist, primarily a painter, who was a very successful commercial illustrator in New York. Unhappy, being well paid and having more work than he could handle, he decided that it would be much more fun to turn his attention to fine art, to teach at the university level, and to starve. This hunger caused him to focus on putting food into his paintings and, fun fact, all his paintings are actually edible.

Kent Christensen:   1:40
That's my new official bio right there. Thank you so much.

Glen Nelson:   1:44
They're scratch-'n'-sniff, a little-known trivia.  

Kent Christensen:   1:48
That's great.  

Glen Nelson:   1:49
Years ago, this must have been--I don't know if you were even remember--about a decade ago, I was visiting your house, and I saw this little drawing on the table. It was just a sketch. Do you remember that? When would that have been?

Kent Christensen:   2:02
It would have been more than 10 years, probably.

Glen Nelson:   2:05
And it was a picture of Brigham Young riding a dinosaur. There were some other elements. I remember the Spiral Jetty, Promontory Point trains, the mountains of Utah. I have a pretty good spidey sense for these things, and I immediately knew that this was going to grow up to be something major. And indeed it has. Today. I'd like to focus our discussion on one work: Kent Christensen's "Secrets of the Great Salt Lake." On our website, centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org, we've posted an image of "Secrets of the Great Salt Lake." If you're listening, take a minute and give it a good perusal. I guarantee you'll have fun doing so. Hit pause. Go ahead. We'll wait. How long should we give him?  

Kent Christensen:   2:48
30 minutes?

Glen Nelson:   2:48
Welcome back. So this is perhaps the most complex painting you've ever done. In an interview that aired on a local PBS episode of "This Is Utah," you said you'd spent 500 hours working on this project.

Kent Christensen:   3:01
Yeah, because from the very beginning, back when your spidey sense was getting in and actually mine kicked in about the same time. That was a long time ago, and I think it was more than 10 years ago that I did the first sketches. The one that you saw was probably maybe a third stage sketch after some thumbnails. I was looking through my sketchbook recently, and I saw some of those old sketches where things were in different places than when they landed. So that's when I thought, "Ok, I think there's something here." 

Glen Nelson:   3:36
Nothing robs a joke of its humor more than explaining why it's funny. You said in some previous interviews that you don't want to decode everything in your paintings. Why is that?  

Kent Christensen:   3:46
Because it's boring.  

Glen Nelson:   3:47
It's not that much fun.

Kent Christensen:   3:48
It's not fun. No, it's not fun. It's like, "Oh, here. I'm gonna tell you a bunch of jokes. But let me give you the punchline before I tell you the joke, so you'll get it. Make sure you get it."

Glen Nelson:   3:57
Yeah, here comes the joke. Here's the funny. Get ready. Gird up. But I assume you don't have a problem with other people looking and looking deeply into your paintings and trying to find everything that they confined, right?  

Kent Christensen:   4:10
No, I love that.      

Glen Nelson:   4:11
So maybe today we'll get some happy medium between those two. You know, this process of looking is a funny conundrum. All artists, to some extent, want the same thing. They want the viewer, listener, reader, whatever to stop and slow down, right?  

Kent Christensen:   4:28
Yep.  

Glen Nelson:   4:28
To pay attention. This challenge that was only increased, I think, in the Instagram world we live in where attention spans are measured in fractions of seconds. So we're all speed readers in a way, now. What do you try to do to get people just to look a little bit more carefully into your work?

Kent Christensen:   4:44
Well, part of the reason why I load them up with things that are sometimes even hidden is to force them to do that. Because I think once you see something that's hidden in a painting or something, that's not immediately obvious, then it's sort of always on the surface. But it's the time between you don't know it's there until you know it's there that's kind of the fun time, interesting discovery period for me.

Glen Nelson:   5:11
Well, that's how I react to things. Yeah, I think there are some artists who create this almost meditative environment around a painting, and that allows me into want to slow down, too.  

Kent Christensen:   5:20
Yes.

Glen Nelson:   5:20
So it could be the opposite of what you're saying of packing, right?  

Kent Christensen:   5:25
Exactly.  

Glen Nelson:   5:25
It's not like a "Where's Waldo" experience. It still has to be cohesive and artistic and structured and so on, Right? Is that how you look at?  

Kent Christensen:   5:33
Definitely. I think so.   

Glen Nelson:   5:35
I remember going to an exhibition of your paintings in London once. You're represented there by Eleven, that's the name of the gallery, a few blocks away from Buckingham Palace. Pretty good digs really. At the opening, I watched people do a dance with your paintings. I don't know if you've ever watched people do this. But they were there. They were walking on their way to the wine and cheese table, and they would see paintings and then it would circle back. They would kind of go past them again, and they would come back yet again. And each time they were there, they would get closer and closer, until it was like a nose-to-canvas experience. Have you ever watched people?

Kent Christensen:   6:11
I haven't, but I should. I should do that. I'm going to do that.

Glen Nelson:   6:14
It's like you have this way of reeling them in. Yeah, it's funny. It's not a bait-and-switch. It's the opposite. It's like you're showing them...

Kent Christensen:   6:21
A tease.

Glen Nelson:   6:21
The more that you look, there's more to be seen, which I think has to be really satisfying experience for you as well.

Kent Christensen:   6:27
Definitely.   

Glen Nelson:   6:30
So back to this painting "Secrets of the Great Salt Lake," what is the setting in this painting? We're looking at it here. It's it's kind of propped up in front of us. 

Kent Christensen:   6:38
Yeah, you're out to the west of the Wasatch Range, somewhere in a cluster of lake-ish looking bodies of water, which is actually how the Great Salt Lake is in some spots. It's not like a neatly defined body of water, necessarily. And it's just looking at sunset when the sun is hitting the tops of the the Wasatch Mountains and everything else is kind of illuminated below. 

Glen Nelson:   7:04
In an interview that you gave you, were talking about why this location is meaningful to you and your family. What was that about?

Kent Christensen:   7:10
Well, my dad's people, they all came to Utah over a period of time between 1847 and 1870, and they all happen to, for varying reasons, end up in Brigham City, Box Elder County. Brigham City has a huge common boundary and the lake is part of the county. I'm guessing, not that familiar with the way the map looks, but it's a big county, and it's really defined by the views of the lake. The bird refuge that's up there that I would go to from before I can even remember, and just the sort of natural world that exists up there and also the Spiral Jetty that's up there in that county that a lot of people in Brigham City were instrumental in helping to create Robert Smithson's vision. So there's that connection to the lake.

Glen Nelson:   8:05
And Promintory Point? What's the family story connected to that?

Kent Christensen:   8:11
Well, my great great grandfather, who is one of the first Caucasian children born in Utah, was 19. He literally turned 19 on the day that the golden spike was driven. And, as you can imagine, a teenage boy hearing about this thing, the railroad that was coming to Utah from both sides of the country, he had no way of knowing what that would look like. He says in his biography that there were barely any descriptions of what a railroad was in those days, in the schools that he would have attended in Utah, the very early schools, there are newspapers were very uncommon. So it was a super exciting event in his life, and it's highlighted in his biography. That was one of the the things he remembered at the end of his life.

Glen Nelson:   9:01
I think it's extraordinary that these things that we see, historical things we imagine they're just a part of history. We don't really think so much that they were part of our own history.  

Kent Christensen:   9:13
Yeah, that's right.

Glen Nelson:   9:14
So it's completely cool. This is a funny painting and has a lot of adorable things in it. In this case, these two trains are meeting together, and one train coming from the West is loaded up with sweets. What are the things on the other train that's coming from the East?

Kent Christensen:   9:30
I put Porter Rockwell in the driver's seat with his gun, and right behind the engine is a gun train full of guns and a picture of a gun. Then there's various kinds of toxic waste, radiation biohazards, and the caboose, with the American flag flying upside down at the end of it, sort of just indicating it looks like a prison caboose. I was trying to make it into a prison caboose, sort of like much darker version of a train coming in. Leland Stanford is driving the other train, and he's the one who drove the spike, and he was the governor of California at the time.

Glen Nelson:   10:21
All right, so what is on the train from the West?

Kent Christensen:   10:23
Instead of guns, it's got Jell-O right behind the engine, followed by Snelgrove's ice cream in that classic double cone that you still see in a couple of spots and Salt Lake and their historic locations. There's kind of an Olympic train that's sort of hidden behind one of the dinosaurs, followed by Coke bottles that have the letters Z. C. M. I. printed on them, and then a donut caboose at the end, which is set up for distribution. I think there's a tray of doughnuts just waiting for you to sample them there.

Glen Nelson:   10:57
You know, this composition brings a lot of different and fanciful ideas together. It's like there's a time traveling element in it. For me, it's highly fictionalized in a way. I mean, unless there's some photograph of Brigham Young riding a dinosaur that I don't know about. But you're referencing real people and real events, and part of it starts feeling to me like nonfiction, like a bunch of crazy things happened or could happen all in one scene. I think that's kind of adorable. I'm just gonna go over a few of the elements in it, and you'll give me some more. So that's the main thing is the structure of the painting itself. It's a triptych, so it's in three panels. They're not equal sizes. The center one is double the width of the outside. Of the two panels on the side, Brigham is riding a dinosaur, there's the Great Salt Lake, there's a pink Salt Lake Temple. What is that made out of, the pink temple?

Kent Christensen:   11:55
I'm guessing something that's a sugar-based substance or pink limestone.

Glen Nelson:   12:00
Okay, and there's a flamingo on a whale. Is that a whale?

Kent Christensen:   12:04
That's a whale. Yeah, there's a whole story about how this Australian guy wanted to put whales in the Great Salt Lake. It's a true story. Google it.

Glen Nelson:   12:14
It's salt. What was he thinking?

Kent Christensen:   12:17
It's a lot saltier than the ocean, that's for sure. Yeah, but whales do live in the salty ocean. Yeah, I haven't read this story for a few years, but it was part of the research that I did for figuring out all the different ideas. There's so many more secrets to the Great Salt Lake than I could include on this painting. I ran out of time, I guess.

Glen Nelson:   12:35
In the foreground of the painting is the Spiral Jetty, except for instead of that black basalt rocks of the real jetty, we have saltwater taffy arranged in a spiral shape.

Kent Christensen:   12:48
Yes, which is similar to a lot of other paintings I've done and print in particular that we did together about, I don't know, 15 years ago that incorporated saltwater taffy as the spiral jetty. When I was a kid and we would come visit my relatives here from California, I remember walking up and down Main Street in Salt Lake, and it was much more kind of a tourist-friendly place than on Main Street was. And there were little shops, every little store, the restaurant there, diner, whatever had like a taffy machine in the window, twisting away these pulls, like you don't see that lately. Maybe it still exists in places like Cape May or some other kind of places that are old fashioned kind of resort places. And so, in my child brain, my five year old brain, I was "Oh, we're in Salt Lake City and they make salt water taffy. It must come from the lake." I always wanted to make that connection, even though it was many years later when I realized that nothing should be ever eaten that comes from the lake. I wanted to make that happen.

Glen Nelson:   13:55
You've got images from different parts of the state, though, is that from Arches National Park? 

Kent Christensen:   14:01
That's the famous arch that's on on the license plate and people go visit in Arches.

Glen Nelson:   14:07
You have animals and plants that are indigenous to Utah. On the far left side you have-- is that like a what kind of statue. Who is it?

Kent Christensen:   14:20
The Native American chief?  

Glen Nelson:   14:22
He comes from a tobacco shop?

Kent Christensen:   14:24
It no, you would think, though it does look like that when it's out of context. But the first time I remember going to the Manti Temple walking into the world room, my breath was taken away because visually, it looks as if this Indian chief is basically standing on top of the altar in that temple in that room in the Manti Temple. So I basically just lifted it. He's pretty similar. It's very hard to get an exact reproduction image of that particular painting.  

Glen Nelson:   14:57
So is that a Teichert?  

Kent Christensen:   14:58
It must have been, I'm guessing because I believe she did most of that. And then the rock formations to the side of that are Bryce Canyon.

Glen Nelson:   15:09
Is that a bristlecone pine?

Kent Christensen:   15:12
Yeah.  

Glen Nelson:   15:14
I was just reading this fascinating art about article about bristlecone pines and how, even with the nature of aquifers in decline ,and there's not enough water, and so forth and all the fires that are going on--this is so far off topic--but bristlecone pines grow so far apart from each other that when fires happen, it's almost like they're self isolate.  

Kent Christensen:   15:37
Interesting.

Glen Nelson:   15:37
That's from my neck of the woods near Cedar City. There's some sort of sad things going on here, too. I see fires on the right. What is that?

Kent Christensen:   15:50
Well, the right panel is more informed by more current times. I'm patterning it a bit narratively after the Bosch "Garden of Earthly Delights," where you have kind of a progression from left to right, and the right panel is a more contemporary, darker view. He's really dark. It was actually basically predicting the great World Wars long before they occurred. And when you look at them, you really they look like photographs and blitzkrieg and things like that. But this one is a little more a little more settled. It has a lot to do with what has been happening more recently with fire and problems around a drought, the energy crisis, and things like that. So I have a forest fire going. I tried to make it beautiful because I really like painting things that are beautiful, even if they are menacing and ominous. There's a condor or turkey buzzard, one of the two biggest birds in Utah, along with golden eagles.

Glen Nelson:   17:02
One of the things that I was noticing looking at the paintings is although there are lots of disparate elements, they are harmonized by design issues, by structural things that connect them. So this giant dinosaur standing in the Great Salt Lake, its tail has a big spiral that goes around the bird. Its shadow below causes another spiral. The smoke from the fire that almost feels like a snake curves around and has a rattle at the top of the circles. That echoes the Spiral Jetty shape that's in front of it. So did you consciously say, "Okay, I need these elements that are gonna combine structurally to make it stronger"? 

Kent Christensen:   17:44
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I'm always drawn to designing something where I can kind of lead a viewer through the painting and give their eye someplace to go, and it happens in a big level, which I know that anything that spans all three of the of the panels like the dinosaurs do, or the lake. That's something that's gonna keep your eye moving back and forth. But the spirals definitely create almost a pattern and definitely a motif, where, like in music, it's sort of like every every time you listen to a particular kind of music, then it becomes familiar.

Glen Nelson:   18:28
You have visual cadence built into the painting and the top of the smoke curls around the temple and then has its rattle. And then above the temple, of course. Moroni's on top of it. But then hovering above that is the Golden Spike.

Kent Christensen:   18:43
Yes, that right, Right, exactly. So there's all this gold up in that band to the top of the painting, with the tops of the peaks incorporating the tops of the spires. There's always been a relationship between the the temple in the mountains, and there's always been the gold of the angel and the gold of the Golden Spike, or both things that are very if you were to ask somebody in the quiz like, "Okay, what two things that are gold are symbolic of the state of Utah?" They would definitely come up with at least angel Moroni and the Golden Spike. They're both iconic gold things. That and they're kind of always in competition with each other as well. Which is why I put them in a maybe not so much threatening but challenging position with each other.

Glen Nelson:   19:32
And for me, gold and Utah history has to do with the ship Brooklyn that ended up in San Francisco close to Sutter's Mill. Those members of the early church took their wealth, came to Salt Lake, and really endowed it financially, right? And then the two railroads that connected essentially brought money to the state. It brought commerce in a serious way, for the first time, are changed its culture in every possible way. So there's so much going on beyond just the iconography here.

Kent Christensen:   20:07
I was trying to imagine my great great grandfather's worldview and how, on his 19th birthday, he was probably more just excited about something like a train coming into his world. But the truth is that that event probably changed the way he lived more than anything else, because he ended up being the first person to own a car in Brigham City. That car would have come on the train. All kinds of things like that. He ended up traveling by train and eventually air travel. He died in the thirties. So air travel was a thing by then, just the arc of history and the rapid change that comes into a place like this or would have come into a place like this in the year 1869. 

Glen Nelson:   20:55
I was thinking earlier today about the isolation of Utah after their immigration here and how this event and broke that.  

Kent Christensen:   21:04
That's right.  

Glen Nelson:   21:04
And you were talking about airplane travel and car travel. Well, the interstate system of highways is really a relatively recent development...forties, fifties.  

Kent Christensen:   21:13
Yeah, that's right. I can remember when you didn't take the freeway all the way to Utah from California. You were on it for a while, and then you got up and you're on a regular to two-lane highway most of the way. So people were trying to find out, like, who are these people who live in Utah. It's almost like there was a moat around it.

Glen Nelson:   21:34
I saw a photograph of your studio in 15 Bytes, the publication that is published here in Utah, in 2018 when you first exhibited a study of the painting at Writ & Vision Gallery in Provo, Utah. It showed a watercolor version of "Secrets" in process and hanging above It was a large reproduction of "Garden of Earthly Delights," that Hieronymus Bosch masterpiece, both of the same configuration of a triptych with roughly the same proportions. Is that right? And a fair amount of color similarities. Although I suspect that Bosch means more to you than just designed template. So tell me about your connection with him.

Kent Christensen:   22:15
Well, when I first saw that painting in 1980 or '81 in Spain, I remember thinking, "Whoa, the narrative description, the level of narrative description of something that he only knows what this is about." Right?

Glen Nelson:   22:34
I was at the Prado in Madrid last year. And you know, this is hung in the basement.

Kent Christensen:   22:39
Oh, yeah.

Glen Nelson:   22:40
There's a room of his paintings, and the thing that shocked me the most about it was how early he was: 1452-1516. And you said something about the prophetic nature of it that I was unaware of.

Kent Christensen:   22:54
Oh, yeah.

Glen Nelson:   22:55
Is that a part of "Garden of Earthly Delights" a well known reading of that?

Kent Christensen:   23:02
Yeah. Yeah. When you look at the right panel, it looks like blitzkrieg. Basically, it looks like a lot of Europe looked in the Second World War. This painting I painted to be almost exactly half the size of the original.

Glen Nelson:   23:19
Fo me, Bosch is works are perpetually contemporary, like if you were to say, "OK, when was his painting made?" No one is going to say it's a 16th century painting. Yeah, like they just wouldn't say it. I know it's like what Ezra Pound said about literature, "It's news that stays new." That's a really difficult quality for an artist to convey. Yeah, like how do you imagine that your paintings will be perceived in the future differently than today? Is that something that you take into account at all?

Kent Christensen:   23:54
I don't think about that. I do realize that these things will outlive me. Hopefully, unless they get destroyed in some way. That's one of the great things about being a painter is you realize you're creating things that potentially will live many times your lifetime into the future. But I think I always so concerned about just making a successful piece of work. I never really think beyond. You know how my kid's gonna deal with having to carry all this baggage into.

Glen Nelson:   24:30
I think there's almost a universality, though, in your paintings that I don't think will change the way they're read too much other than there are prophetic things that you put in your painting sometimes, right? Like you when you're talking here about this idea of nature, which is kind of idealized, here and beautiful with dark things on the horizon and also the import of dangerous things in the right.  

Kent Christensen:   24:59
That's right. And that's a part of the state's story not gonna go away in my lifetime, unfortunately, and those air issues we're going to be dealing with long into the future, and hopefully we'll figure them out. I'm always kind of drawn to different writers who write about history in terms of how our lives will be looking in the future, and it's not always comforting, you know? Yeah, I think we've dodged a lot of bullets. We've taken a lot of bullets, but I think we're lucky so far. And I generally I think you get a sense from because my paintings are fairly upbeat and optimistic overall. I'm an optimistic person. But the older I get, the more sort of pessimistic I feel. I used to be a little more pessimistic than I used to, just because I worry about the world as it will evolve into the lives of my children and grandchildren.

Glen Nelson:   26:01
Your paintings do often get a response from viewers that they're fun, and they're upbeat. But there's this other side of it, the satire side of it, right? In this painting that we're looking at, how conscious were you of building into its narrative things that were satirical?

Kent Christensen:   26:22
Really conscious, because for me, that's the fun part. I love the fun part of creating art and watching people react to it, and for me, like, for instance, when when you first saw the sketch for this many years ago and you said, you know, your Spidey-sense kicked in...

Glen Nelson:   26:42
I remember telling you, "I don't know what else you're doing, but stop. Stop whatever else you're doing."

Kent Christensen:   26:48
And I should have taken your advice. This painting would have actually come to life many years ago. But I did have other things I had to do at the time. But I was thinking the same way. And it's fun because I think you were the first other person who was able to see the vision of the potential that I had in this painting. So I knew that because of the way I had designed it, just from  layout and and the ideas behind what I could pack into a painting like this. There was a lot of potential for satire and story and humor and irony, and you know all the things that make any kind of narrative interesting.

Glen Nelson:   27:36
Yeah, it's like when you go to a really good restaurant and you're eating this food and it could be delicious or whatever, but it's the depth of flavor that really makes you love it, right? And so there's charm on the surface of this painting, but then you say, "Wait a minute. Hold on a second second." It's not just that Brigham is riding a dinosaur. He has reins.  

Kent Christensen:   28:03
Exactly    

Glen Nelson:   28:05
There's a bit in the dinosaur's mouth. There's a brand that says BY.

Kent Christensen:   28:09
 Because honey, you know that if there were dinosaurs in Utah when he got here in 1847 he would have done that.

Glen Nelson:   28:17
He would totally would have. He would have domesticated those, "I'm entitled to it. It's all mine."  

Kent Christensen:   28:25
Yeah.  

Glen Nelson:   28:26
On top of the mountains, in the Desert Alphabet, you posted all the names of the peaks, which is cool to me. And also, Brigham Young has a belt in good cowboy form with the letter, Y on the belt buckle?

Kent Christensen:   28:43
Yeah, and his blue BYU best as well because I was working up of an actual black and white photograph. So all of that part of him is accurate. Except for the color in the belt buckle.

Glen Nelson:   28:55
He has good hair.

Kent Christensen:   28:56
Great hair. That was a young version of Brigham Young.

Glen Nelson:   29:00
He was rocking it. Very Hollywood, some Brad Pitt-iness in there.  

Kent Christensen:   29:07
Exactly.  

Glen Nelson:   29:08
I'm curious to know what other kinds of versions of this painting there are. So I saw an original sketch that you said was a second or third generation of it, the idea forming. How did you develop from that to this? 

Kent Christensen:   29:24
I took that sketch you saw and basically did a watercolor study because I got to the point where I had made notes all around the perimeter of that sketch. And I didn't want to do a lot more work on it because it was getting a little fragile.

Glen Nelson:   29:41
When you say notes, do you mean like you would write the word "dinosaur" or whatever?

Kent Christensen:   29:45
Yeah, Pink Floyd is the name of the Flamingo. So when I heard about Floyd and that whole story of him escaping from the Tracy Aviary in Liberty park, I thought, "OK, think Floyd's going in there." I wrote "Pink Floyd" on the margin. I might have included him in that sketch. I don't remember, but I definitely included him in the color study. That idea of the year before I did this final, but everything like the Indian paintbrush, the forest fire, the smoke that looks like a snake. The arch, all of the stuff that's on all the trains. There probably were a lot more things written in the margins that I eliminated just because it was too much, right? I needed to add it.

Glen Nelson:   30:28
How do you decide how historical to be?

Kent Christensen:   30:33
An effort to be kind of believable. 

Glen Nelson:   30:41
I didn't know the flamingo story. I thought you just made that up.  

Kent Christensen:   30:44
No.  

Glen Nelson:   30:45
So now I'm thinking, "Oh, wait, There's probably a reason that everything is in here."

Kent Christensen:   30:48
Yeah, there is. There's a story behind everything to me because I'm so familiar with all the pieces of it. It doesn't seem like there are many unconscious of the things I left out. But I remember some of the things were added at the very end more at the last minute. And some of the things were included from the very start.

Glen Nelson:   31:09
I remember the earlier painting structurally was a lot simpler. You just got more and more complex, which I think it makes you feel like you're almost compelled to discover more. And not just the number of things that are in there, but the logic for them. How conscious were you about taking Bosch-isms and translating them in some way to Utah? Or was that just not part of it?  

Kent Christensen:   31:40
No, I wanted enough of that to be carried over from the Bosch painting to have people who are familiar with it immediately recognize it. And the most obvious thing in the painting is the temple on the black rocks, the pink temple. It's very, very similar to some of the structures that are in the left panel of the Bosch painting. There are definitely things that I wanted to really evoke a connection. But then the rest of it is more kind of, it grew out of the thumbnail to study to full size, and once you have worked things out as much as you can at a smaller scale, it's kind of like a snake shedding its skin. You kind of have to go bigger to really explore what else can go come in there. At least that's the way I work. I need to work things out small as much as I can and stay small because it takes too long to work everything out of full size. And then when I feel like okay, I need to shed that skin and move to a bigger size, then even more comes in. And then the third stage in this case, there's kind of four stages or five stages from the very smallest original thumbnail to this size.

Glen Nelson:   32:55
Are you thinking that this is the ultimate?  

Kent Christensen:   32:58
No, you know, I'm actually play around with it. If I had a lot of time on my hands, hopefully someday I might, I was telling people at the exhibit in Springville at the Spring Salon...

Glen Nelson:   33:10
Is that that's where this was exhibited most recently?

Kent Christensen:   33:11
Most recently it was at UVU, but before that it was a Springville museum at the Spring Salon in the summer, and I was telling people that I have an idea to do a full size of the original "Garden of Earthly Delights," which is twice as big and that way more things could actually fit without it seeming to be overdone. 

Glen Nelson:   33:35
Now this is switching gears a tiny bit. I'm curious about working in a series. So I know a lot of artists who work on multiple images that are connected to each other, at the same time. And they explore one thing by looking at it from lots of different ways. And eventually, when the works are exhibited, they sort of tell a cohesive story, like a fashion designer who's showing a runway show that are all related to each other. I know that you have worked in series. In some ways, some of the paintings that you've done are connected to other works. What does that provide for you to work in a series or to develop a painting and do multiple versions of it, toying with it and examining it?

Kent Christensen:   34:17
It creates a context and also kind of a certain amount of attention the way you're giving yourself sort of two points. If you created two paintings and you want to make third, fourth, fifth and sixth one that I'll have to relate to the first ones you've done, you sort of have to figure out how to keep them all of a piece, but also individual at the same time. At least that's how I think about when I'm painting a series of things.

Glen Nelson:   34:46
There's the Andy Warhol version of doing that where it's basically, you know, those screen print paintings are the whole point of them is they were almost automatically generated, right? I heard today of an artist who is his practice, when he sells a painting, he thinks, "Oh, I should paint another one exactly like it." And then he sells that one. I thought, "That doesn't feel ethical to me." Anyway, so that's not what you're doing. You're exploring.    

Kent Christensen:   35:15
I have done paintings that are, you could say, that they're almost identical to each other because of the theme. The one painting of Salt Lake 1870. There are three versions of that. For instance, none of them are the same size, and each of them are a little bit different in terms of their color palette and detail that they're done in. And so I couldn't do that. I don't think I'm capable of sustaining the kind of attention that it would take to absolutely duplicate a painting you know, several times.

Glen Nelson:   35:53
And the idea it's intellectually bankrupt. I think one of the keys to falling in love with your paintings that people don't talk about as much as they should, I think, is scale. I think your paintings have a lot to do with scale and the idea for me that you're taking an image that started off as a small sketch and just getting bigger and bigger in this case, although it could have works the opposite way shows more about how you build up images, and I think the way that you use things golden ratio is part of your work and proportions and hidden imagery that can only be seen from a certain angle. Those are all Renaissance, Old Master... We would call them?

Kent Christensen:   36:41
Tricks.

Glen Nelson:   36:41
But their techniques are no less common today.  

Kent Christensen:   36:47
That's right.  

Glen Nelson:   36:47
So even though the subject matter might seem really contemporary, like a Krispy Kreme donut, you're approaching it from this classical viewpoint.  

Kent Christensen:   36:58
Yeah, it's funny.  

Glen Nelson:   36:59
It's like, for me, one of the things that I like about it is the joke about, let's say a sugary thing is there's this sugar rush right when you eat something, and you get this initial surprise and delight of it, but that's what also happens with your paintings. There's this initial sugar high, but the more that you look into it, it's like, "Oh, there's protein in here."

Kent Christensen:   37:23
Yeah, that's right.  

Glen Nelson:   37:23
"There substance in here."

Kent Christensen:   37:24
Yeah.  

Glen Nelson:   37:26
Today I am here in town for something sad. I had a member of my family passed away, and I went to a funeral. The question of legacy is on my mind a little bit today because of that. And so I'm wondering what you think what your legacy of painting might be. You know, you have a family, both of your daughters like art, one of your daughters is actively involved in making art. You have art around your home, your families are surrounded by it, too. What do you think about legacy regarding your own work? DONE TO HERE.

Kent Christensen:   37:58
I think I like to make work that makes people think, rather than just have, like a beautiful landscape. I've done that. I've done beautiful. Still lives and maybe not so beautiful still pipes. But on Portrait's all that stuff. But for me to make the thing that makes it interesting or meaningful, poor endows an image with meaning, as if there's some other kind of deeper message or meaning or potential for reading something into it. I mean, you could do that with any kind of painting with a landscape of painting of a man riding a horse or whatever, but I kind of it kind of duck tales more and more each year that I enjoy teaching where I really feel like the most important part of my legacy is, Did I make people think about things that I make people, that I tryto de Boake, a thoughtful approach to how they look at heart? You know,

Glen Nelson:   39:02
when I look at art, I often look at it What it's not. That's how I sometimes defined. Okay, you know, it's a doughnut, in part because it's not a loaf of bread. And why is it different with fine art? For me? Part of the definition is it's not illustration. Yeah, and I've wanted for a while to ask somebody who was successful in both of those worlds. Yeah, what the differences are for you, really? Between art and illustration. My guess is that some people think condescendingly of illustrations, of course, and the art is by its nature elevated. But there's bad art and there's a great illustration. That's right. But how do you divide those terms and what those two feels meant for you?

Kent Christensen:   39:47
Well, yeah, This isn't a battle that has gone on ever since. I remember being in art school before that. And whenever you're at on a back alley, you've you. I'm in the fine art area, but I work a lot with people in the design and illustration area and at the university of you. Time in the illustration. Graphic design area. But all of the people in the fine itinerary are friends of mine who were teachers in my master's program. And so there's always this tension and you do get a little bit of a sense of people looking down their nose at you. Well, so you're still doing illustration or whatever, but I'm like, I'm I agree with you. There's good. Are bad, are there's good illustration. There's great illustration. Um, and I think it all has to do with depth. And if it makes you think and if it's well designed. And if there is just like a structural integrity to the piece,

Glen Nelson:   40:43
I think that integrity is an important part for me. I think that their goals are different. You know, the illustrator is is definitely trying to please a client, right? And sometimes they submit to that

Kent Christensen:   40:59
absolutely. And if the client is more powerful than the creative thinking behind project, that's usually a disaster. And it shows. But, I mean, historically illustration. I mean, when you see rock hard. A lot of that is people trying to communicate to each other. You know,

Glen Nelson:   41:18
I'm noticing the Norman Rockwell effect these days, and that's just in my years of, you know, I'm not all that old. He was a pariah years ago. There is no way you would see a major museum hang hang on a work of exactly I don't think that people dislike them. I thought I think people thought really highly of the accomplishment of it in a sort of Americana way. Yeah, but you know, museums, air hanging those things now. And Spielberg's paying $100 million Yes, for one of those now and as I talk here in Utah to museums like the Church History Museum and BYU, both of whom have had Norman Rockwell shows they were blockbusters and it wasn't just because they were accessible. People really responded to them, I think, in emotional and intellectual way.

Kent Christensen:   42:09
Yeah, that's right, Yeah, the emotional and intellectual components that show in particular, which I remember really well, we're so apparent, I mean, to the point where they have a lot of context that was provided on how he worked in a studio with opening night. The woman who posed as a little girl in the painting.

Glen Nelson:   42:30
Oh, yeah, I was there. I remember reading about that.

Kent Christensen:   42:33
There was a minister from African American Church in Salt Lake who gave the implication. It was very powerful, kind of a civil rights themed show.

Glen Nelson:   42:42
When I was a teenager, I had a Norman Rockwell book, just reproductions, and my little nieces and nephews who were like three years old. Five year olds, old, seven years old, would sit on my lap, and I would open that Rockwell book and we would talk through a painting. You like. The guy who's found Santa Claus is his dad, right? You know, And they would talk through that process and I wouldn't tell them what it was about and they would talk through and they would have this Ah ha moment. And for them, that was like the most powerful artistic moment that they had ever had that an image had Maur to it than its surface waas. Right? I would say not knocking Rockwell, that your paintings often go beyond that in their intent that I think Rockwell has a I get it moment and that's sort of the end. In some ways, I think your paintings are designed to give more and more overtime, and I don't think it's necessarily are. That's what

Kent Christensen:   43:40
I care about more. I mean, I don't think I have the same technical facility that he had in terms of being an illustrator. Um, nine illustration work was much simpler, much more conceptual and cerebral and how it looked. Those were all watercolors, mostly. And I think you he was kind of famous for not saying that he was an artist.

Glen Nelson:   44:03
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, he was a denier. Absolutely. Which only makes me like him more if you wouldn't

Kent Christensen:   44:10
like him so much. He went so modest about it, right?

Glen Nelson:   44:13
He was not pretentious about this

Kent Christensen:   44:14
work. Yeah, he had this crazy work ethic from way before. I knew when I saw that show way back into the twenties and he worked right up into the sixties. Really? So you know, there is so much about him that is so incredibly amazing. But I really don't care about that kind of level of technical, you know, rendering that he could do. When I talked to my students who are learning to paint, I think maybe some of them will go on to learn that level of technical rendering. But I'm more interested in refinement and whether that's technical or whether that's kind of conceptual or design based, those are areas where I think I'm more interested more interested in underlying theme center, a deeper meaning than just something that's beautifully rendered. Yeah, it looks just like a dinosaur. Oh, my gosh. Well,

Glen Nelson:   45:09
I mean, it's not to take anything away from your image. We're looking. I'm looking at it here. And, you know, you can look very close at this image and want to even get closer and closer. They're really quite beautiful. So you're being tough on yourself about it's rendered. Let's end by talking about satire. Something kept Our Rockwell. It's not his thing. So let's go talk about satire, which is funny stuff. D'oh! Well, you know he's humorous, but it is a poke. Knowing in America that's not you, that's not his thing. So satire is the use of humor, irony or exaggeration, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues. In the culture of Latter day Saint arts, there are fewer works of contemporary satire. Then you'd likely find looking at American arts or some other subcultures. Broadly. Yeah, so LDS arts are a little bit light on satire. I wouldn't I would generalize to say it would be interesting to have an exhibition of humor in our culture's art.

Kent Christensen:   46:13
That would be interesting. I would love that.

Glen Nelson:   46:14
Yeah, historically, the exception being a large number of political cartoons dating back from early anti Mormon images, literature and film from the 19th century forward and political cartoons today, which are quite successful, that's right in fine art. What does satire uniquely accomplished, though

Kent Christensen:   46:33
that's a really good question, and nobody's really ever asked. Actually, one. It's very tricky

Glen Nelson:   46:39
because a big part of the paintings that I'm seeing your work is it's a tone issue. And so it does accomplish something different than if it weren't there,

Kent Christensen:   46:50
right? I want it sort of, um, balance between the satire, the satirical, um, the kind of editorializing that I like to do, kind of in a subtle way, along with just overall tone and sometimes those things. They're not exactly harmonious. But that, for me, makes for an interesting problem to solve. And so I'm always looking at ways of presenting something to an audience they might not have considered in a particular kind of context. I mean, I come, you know, like like so many of us. We come from a culture that's fairly big on authoritarianism and, like not making fun of modeling is evil. Mocking is evil. Yeah, but I've always been a a little bit of a rebel in that department because I think partly because I grew up in the sixties and seventies, when the culture had shifted so much and, you know, I was in high school and Nixon resigned. And, um, so I kind of had this different, more critical way of like I need to make sense of things, and I need to know, just take anybody's word for believing what they think, politically or religiously. I really need to figure out what works for me, and I still have to kind of live my life that way. I've always felt like I was important for me to sort of figure out how it works for me and that I wasn't this the kind of person who could just sort of be in lock step with whatever people were doing at the time. In our culture or in our country. That was sort of soul killing for me and for me to feel like alive. The reason why I really thrived in New York. Finally, I was in a place where there were so many people who felt free to just, you know, explore their creative side, You know, do what they felt compelled to do further life's work

Glen Nelson:   48:55
for this painting. For me, secrets of the Great Salt Lake takes what you're describing to a new place because it's almost reading it from left to right as predictive. You have Brigham on the far left side. You know he's wrangled dinosaurs and the consequence for thinking that you could do whatever you want, right? Nature brings you to this place where having not taken care of it, it's old. It's more desolate, even darker things on the horizon, which circles back to channel the things that we have treasured most. That's right. So I I love the all the layers of possibility, the satire in your earlier paintings that had to deal with with sugary things. In the case of an early painting of Jell O, for example, that site satire that's echoed here in this painting, you're saying that we're known for this strange thing. It's not like we're so fond of how jello tastes like like it everywhere, the Italians saying they love pasta. No, we're the Utah saying We love yellow. It's not like that. We care that much about

Kent Christensen:   50:05
exactly I go years without eating any of it.

Glen Nelson:   50:07
Yeah, but also is not particularly healthy thing Jell O right. But there's love in the oh, there's love in that satiric work because you're saying, yes, we are a little bit nutty, but that binds us together in a way to write Think is almost like you're codifying a culture with this symbol. That's this little green wall, believe

Kent Christensen:   50:27
Yeah, yeah, that's kind of an absurd symbol for Carter playing a culture, But it's true.

Glen Nelson:   50:32
I think you're also suggesting, and you like, you'll tell me like if I help how wrong I am on this, Okay? You're also suggesting that we don't smoke or drink, but it's not like consuming truckloads of sugar is all the help you like. Let's not get carried away on our superior health wise. It's true.

Kent Christensen:   50:47
The only hate mail I ever got or maybe the first hate mail I ever got, actually should correct was was after I did an interview with Peggy at Salt Lake Tribune, and she quoted me as saying something like, Well, we'll make sure that we don't drink copy ever. But it's okay to just pound a whole box of Twinkies. And, you know, I had basically said, I don't think anybody is going to help her drinking copy. Well, the mail started.

Glen Nelson:   51:18
They said, Oh, no, that's not right. Well, that's good to know. Yeah, good to know. Hey, thanks for art. Teaches you so many things doesn't it? So of course not. Just get a little bit. And chocolate and desserts and diet Coke. And on and on. The fascinating thing for me I think about these is your old master ish care for these earthly delights, right? Yeah. So that goes to tone again. It's like you're subverting the overly common idea that we've got thes manufactured sweet things all around us with the love and care and number of hours that you took to make it, which is a lot of 100 times more than it takes to Baker.

Kent Christensen:   52:01
Eat it. Yeah, it definitely true. Yeah, I've had people tell me that, you know, they want to buy a painting, and then that will be their cupcake. You know, when you think about wanting a cupcake, they'll just know they have that painting, and it has no calories, and it will last a lot longer than any of the process you

Glen Nelson:   52:19
just described. Your appetite really works. That probably

Kent Christensen:   52:22
doesn't. But you know anyone that work? No, not a single one. People say they won't buy my work because they don't want hanging in is a trigger. My trigger trigger their sweet tooth,

Glen Nelson:   52:33
but You probably have friends who scout out delicious things.

Kent Christensen:   52:37
They dio. I have a long list of things. People are constantly contacting me about things. I

Glen Nelson:   52:43
think they're missing the joke. I think they just between us, it's like it's like when you're putting together a meal. You know you have sweet stuff, but there's acid to like Give the vinaigrette hasn't living vinegar. That's right. I think that's the reading of your works. It's like you can think of them as being sugary. That's that's not really the point of

Kent Christensen:   53:06
No, not not at all. No, no went on when I was working on that bodywork to be very beginning. It was really based on the discovery of things that they called kitchen paintings, and they were the northern European. Once, once Northern European painters became really proficient, they realized there was a market for paintings of food and of market place displays that would typically be hung in a kitchen or a dining space of a wealthy home. And I thought, Wow, that's a thing. You know? Let me figure out what that would be in our culture. What kind of a kitchen painting can I Yeah, you know

Glen Nelson:   53:46
will kitsch kids. The key there catches right. Kiss him in the kitchen. For years I had a large painting of years hanging in my home. It was an oversized Oreo cookie hovering over the Salt Lake Temple, and the word Oreo was replaced with the word Mormon. I found it impossible to be gloomy when that painting was in my house. And just for the record, I don't eat a lot of Orioles. So that was not a trigger problem for May. But another thing. When guests would come over, they all wanted to talk about it like it was such a conversation starter about Like what? Why Mormon? What is Mormon mean? And you had a bunch of symbols and fun stuff in there that really connected strongly to our culture. I foolishly sold it to a museum. I've been gloomy ever since. Regret it? Regret is terrible. I feel like I need to binge eat Oreos now to compensate. A little grocery started just down the black. I really wish the latter day saint artists generally were more interested in making things with social relevance. I wish they were. However they define that, or like whatever they never thinks that they care about. I wish that was more a part of their practice to be a force for the things that they really are passionate about. Are is about something that lasts. Wouldn't you agree?

Kent Christensen:   55:02
Definitely. Yeah,

Glen Nelson:   55:03
up lift. On the other hand, to me is the sugar high creative impulses.

Kent Christensen:   55:11
Love. Ouch. Which coach? But that's such a special word. It's uplifting. It's perfect, right?

Glen Nelson:   55:19
Give a tattoo that says, I live

Kent Christensen:   55:21
now like I've seen a couple, though on campus

Glen Nelson:   55:25
I want to thank Can't Christensen for being my guest today. How can listeners see more of your work?

Kent Christensen:   55:31
My website's really easy to find. Kent Christiansen dot com As long as you get the spelling, correct you'll and even if you get a little incorrect, probably rally there.

Glen Nelson:   55:40
You're in S, E N. C.

Kent Christensen:   55:41
And Danish. Yep,

Glen Nelson:   55:43
This is one of a series of interviews with the latter day Saint. Artists are archive. A podcast is available on our website along with some other incredible content center for latter day saint arts dot org's Thanks for listening, everybody. Goodbye. See? Wait, wait Some fun. You've already made the neighborhood fun