I saw my first Trevor Southey painting in 1975: "Jesus and Mary: The Moment After." It depicted, for me, the quintessential Christ. Here was a Jesus with well defined chest and arm muscles, a wiry body, a rugged, determined face - all attributes of a carpenter's son and a man who spent the last three years of his life wandering the land.
I finally met Southey this year, in early April. He was gracious, confident with his work, its direction and willing to answer any question.Responding to a query about the symbolism in his work - the feather, the fruit, the shroud, the gold square, etc. - Southey said most of his iconography was developed back in Africa, where he grew up. He was also quick to mention the influence of BYU art professor Dale Fletcher. Fletcher was - not only for Southey but for many of the young artists at BYU - a swami.
"Around Fletcher clustered a number of art students," says Vern Swanson in his book, "Utah Art," "fired by the idea of creating a religious art for the present day - a great art, expressing the truths of the Mormon faith." Together with Fletcher, the students formed the nucleus of the "Art and Belief Movement."
The movement was a reactionary solution that Fletcher said opposed the "black square, the soup can, the raw portrayal of sexual confusion and the twiddling of the optic nerve." However, the movement lasted less than a decade, dying out in the mid-'70s.
Southey has many fond memories of this period; he still associates and carries on correspondence with many of the artists of the movement. But there was also some hurt that came out of it: After teaching at BYU for eight years, Southey left in 1979. A series of 4-by-8-foot allegorical paintings, portraying male and female nudes, created a controversy - another in a long line of controversies over the subject matter of his oeuvre.
In 1981 his painting "Flight Aspiration" - a nude man and woman soaring through a cerulean blue sky - caused a stir at the Salt Lake International Airport. The painting was removed.
Southey is exhibited and collected internationally. And though currently a resident of San Francisco, he is one of the more influential artists to have worked in Utah.
When the word "contemporary" enters our discussion, Southey grimaces. He admires few contemporary artists. (He finds Jeff Koons laughable . . . but who doesn't?) To Southey, art can't be fashionable.
"I'm very, very distressed at the ease with which things are labeled music and art," he says. "I'm very old-fashioned that way. To me, art in its own right only is significant when it makes the human soul tremble. The `Mona Lisa' does that to me. Picasso's `Guernica' does that to me."
Southey chuckles, remembering a commission he received to design the chapel of the Missoula, Mont., Catholic Hospital. Southey's assistants were helping him block in the Mary figure by jamming large rods of clay into the figure's head and body, in preparation for modeling. "All of a sudden," Southey says, "she had horns and huge forms off her chest, and I realized if I cast it as it was, I'd have been in New York the next day."
He equates his new work to a "whisper." "It's the same subjects," he says, "only there's no `shout.' " Transforming abstracted, ethereal, painterly backgrounds, he turns them into quasi-landscapes, allowing a rose, a shoot of bamboo, a feather, an artichoke to float on tumultuous plains of rose madder, viridian and yellow ochre. His use of additional florals is something Southey enjoys and plans to explore.
"I think my work these days is more inclined to ask questions about an inner Eden," he says. "I find myself gradually drawing the various visual fragments of my Eden into a kind of whole. The human, landscape, geometric and still life aspects begin to marry in both form and concept."
This marriage of human, landscape and still life is unmistakable in "Sentinel Waking" (oil on panel, 4 by 4 feet, 1994). In the piece, a woman awakens from a fetal sleep in a crowded burrow; hovering above and in the distance is a landscape with trees. Both woman and scenery float, surrounded by washes of every imaginable color; sweeping brush strokes propel the viewer around the woman and through the trees and skies above. The composition is Japanese-like in its simplicity, the painting a power house of literacy and imagery.
Southey's etchings and pencil sketches, executed with flawless cross-hatchings, give each work a cinquecento Florentine studio flavor. His bronze sculptures are no less compelling. "Torso" has moments of Rodinesque brilliance with its "puddley" molded muscles. The bronze "Fatherhood" is "about the full spectrum of human experience relative to the child," Southey says, "from the pathos, even terror, and the sheer joy of being part of this other being, to the energy and independence of the soul manifested so early in life."
Southey is represented by Frames Inc., 4878 S. Highland Drive in Salt Lake and Old Town Gallery, 444 Main St. in Park City.