Paintings by Brian Kershisnik at Park City’s Meyer Gallery, including, from left, “Prometheus,” “Foreigners,” “Bringing Food” and “Reading the Burning Book.” Image by Geoff Wichert.

For much of its history, and even today in many places, art has been considered a craft and not a profession. Now, our artists are required to provide themselves with the benchmarks of professional status. One of the details in such an artist’s resumé is where the individual went to school. Yet training in the arts is primarily a personal thing, lessons shared from masters to their apprentices, and has less to do with the influence of any institution. The presence this month in the revitalized Meyer Gallery in Park City of two of Utah’s masters—Emily McPhie and Brian Kershisnik—in close proximity presents not only a chance to enjoy their individually captivating, recent works, but to speculate on how their differing paths to mastery just might have influenced the looks of their artworks.

In Burning Gifts, Kershisnik’s new themes and reworking of some classics conspire to suggest that the months he devoted to his auspicious, mid-career retrospective at BYU MOA were well spent, even as he’s happy to be back in his studio and free from the excess of feedback that project exposed him to. Proof of this, if a bit paradoxical in subject matter, can be seen in “Death Lessons.” Here an artist, though not a self-portrait, works at a table surrounded by paintings that, unlike Pamela Beach’s faux Kershisniks in her portrait of him, do not specifically copy his work. Behind him, with a hand on his shoulder in guidance or solace, stands a figure posed like an angel, but entirely black. The connection being made is between the artist’s more mature outlook, acquired during, and visible in, a lifetime of painting, and the works in the BYU show, surprising to many, that departed from depicting eternal life to focus instead on the rarely-shown, but inescapable companion to it that is death-in-life.

Brian Kershisnik, “Death Lessons,” oil, 40×30 in.

Contrary to rumor, Kershisnik is not entirely self-taught. He studied printmaking in college, served an informal apprenticeship with ceramicist Joe Bennion, and was introduced to paint by Lee Udall Bennion. Since then, he’s both taught at BYU and shared studio space with some of Utah’s finest artists. Yet his technique evolves constantly, the result of a restless striving after essential truth, of which his painting is only one sign. Recently, his urge to explore has turned to color, as evidenced not only by the pointing black figure, but everyone in “Procession,” as well as the bouquet in “Scent Memory,” the blues in “Kite Memory,” the red-and-black environment in “Remembering It Very Differently,” and possibly most meaningfully, in the blood-red sea of “Foreigners”—in which two dogs who look actively curious share a boat with a man who does not. Not only these colors but the wide variety of ways he applies them are uniquely his own.

In Fable, meanwhile, Emily McPhie demonstrates a very different approach, one rooted in her childhood among Utah’s foremost artist family (a dozen and a half and counting, headed by her, her sister Cassandra Barney, and their hugely popular father, James C. Christensen), then more formal training at BYU, and a lifelong, serious sense of vocation that in time overcame the same obstacles that derail the majority of would-be artists. But none of these things determines the way she paints. What they gave her was confidence in the limitless ability of paint to sustain and promote imagination. That, and flawless taste. The way she paints is what she chooses to do with such gifts.

Just what she has chosen is hers to know, but judging from the results, it would seem it was something like two simultaneous, interlocking principles. One is to couch her subject matter in narrative terms, as stories: most often in story forms borrowed from folk tales or, as she calls them here, fables. The other is to present them visually as if they were illustrations as might appear in books or similar media. Many would-be artists are drawn to realistic depiction, but find that approach regarded as out of date. They may struggle to find a justification for it. McPhie has hers, with an assist from her father and reliance on her remarkable technical flair.

Emily McPhie, “The Mocking of Enlightenment,” oil, 48×40 in.

Consider, for example, “The Mocking of Enlightenment.” The title character, either an enlightened person or the embodiment of the quality, sits on an uncomfortable-looking seat, her hands crossed at the wrist as though bound. Six solemn figures hold her up to various crude critiques, bidding her to see herself as they do or making threats. There is a timeless quality to this, but it seems particularly relevant to today, when any attempt to virtuously follow through on principle is met with derision from an otherwise indifferent populace. Similarly, in “The Pardon in Perception,” the dour, even angry looks on the faces of women in a procession fit with the perception today that any act of mercy, a pardon or an act of contrition, is doomed to be seen, rightly or wrongly, as dishonest, manipulative, and even self-centered.

And then there’s the Golden Thread, a name given to that thing which runs through any project or effort, and which keeps those who follow it on course to succeed in it. The exasperated woman who stands among the angry and disputatious buffoons in the work titled “The Golden Thread” could be anyone, man or woman (but most likely the latter) forced to deliver on the lost intentions of all the others, who will of course take credit for her efforts.

Does Emily McPhie intend us to read her painting this way? And if it’s true, does she enjoy having her subtle subtexts read out loud in this fashion? It’s impossible to say, but like Brian Kershisnik, she has created a visual language that allows her to speak to several audiences, or communities within a larger audience, in ways that each viewer can appreciate and take comfort in.

Emily McPhie, “The Pardon in Perception,” oil, 45×33 in.

Brian Kershinsik and Emily McPhie, Meyer Gallery, Park City, through Feb. 21

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.