ARCHITECTS AND DESIGNERS Meyer East Gallery Brian T. KershisnikBrian T. Kershisnik focuses his rare talent and wry humor on the familiar experience of being human; painting people metaphorically and movingly in the quiet moments of their lives. He seems to know instinctively: all that is important in human life involves risk. On almost every canvas there is motion; there is connection; there is risk. Sweetness and bitterness, he once told me, awkwardness and tentative grace.
A great many people live with Kershisnik paintings, and yet these images might come with a warning label. These pictures are not to be matched to the sofa or to the bedspread, nor to be passed by without pausing. They should be shunned by lovers of pastel cupids and sunset watercolors. They are not, as a mountain is not, pretty, and yet they are, as a mountain is, beautiful. They are bold, comic, tender, longing, riddled with transience of time in the midst of fullness. Something like life.
Brian T. Kershisnik was born the fourth and last son of excellent parents. Because of his father's employment as a petroleum geologist, he grew up in Luanda, Angola; Bangkok, Thailand, Conroe, Texas; and Islamabad, Pakistan. He graduated from high school early, not because of sterling merit, but because the American Embassy in Islamabad Pakistan was burned and he was evacuated and the seniors graduated. After a year of college at the University of Utah searching in vain for vocation, he served for a time as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Denmark. He returned to the USA to study art at Brigham Young University, during which studies he received a grant to study in London for six months. After graduate studies in Austin, Texas, he and his young family moved to Kanosh, a very small town in central Utah where he paints and works on his house. He and his wife, Suzanne, now has 3 children and a black dog.
St. Joseph with Infant Jesus with Saints Fixing a Bicycle - Painting - available at Meyer East Gallery |
