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Editor's Note: KSL.com does a weekly feature on artists in the community. If you have a painter, sculptor, musician or creative genius in mind, feel free to email your submission to fjolley@ksl.com. Please include a contact email for the artist, if available. SPRINGVILLE — Almost as soon as she started making art, Jacqui Larsen was focused on the hyperlocal.
Growing up in DeWitt, New York, “within within biking distance of the Erie Canal, the town dump, and a strip mall called Shoppingtown,” as she describes it, Larsen caught the bug to create at a young age.
“By third grade, I identified myself as an artist, instructing my classmates to sit in front of my desk one at a time for their portraits to be drawn, portraits I then taped end to end like an accordion,” she said. “By high school, I was painting plein-air along the Erie Canal, collecting discarded papers for collage from Shoppingtown’s dumpsters, and visiting the art museums in New York City. It was a glorious time.”
Jacqui Larsen, a multimedia artist whose current exhibit at the Springville Museum of Art was a joint effort with her husband and Utah Poet Laureate Lance Larsen, earned her Masters of Fine Arts from Brigham Young University. Over the years, she’s taught on the collegiate level at Northwest College and her alma mater.
“In looking back, I’m surprised to see behind me a breadcrumb trail of art shows, awards, and hundreds of paintings, collages, drawings and assemblages,” she said. “I tend not to think in terms of career, but of lifestyle. When I wake up, I think about painting.”
Though she and her husband travel often with BYU’s study abroad programs, her current exhibit, “Three-Mile Radius,” focuses on what’s right outside her home. During a morning hike in the Springville foothills, Larsen was inspired to tell the story of what is just beyond the walls of her home.
“...I saw a wild rabbit, some magpies fighting, and dozens of wildflowers. What I didn’t see, though, really struck me—people. No one in sight and no moving cars,” she said. “Hundreds of people were enclosed in their boxes (houses) and missing this vibrant spring morning. I immediately looked over the landscape beneath me. If I were to walk 3 miles in every direction from my home studio, what kinds of discoveries would I make? What am I missing by ensconcing myself in my own box (home)?”
- Website: JacquiLarsen.com
- Instagram; @jacquilarsenart
- Facebook: Jacqui Larsen
- Representation: Meyer Gallery, Park City
The project turned into a body of work that involved her husband and contributions from 93 Springville students. The multimedia pieces layer her cleanly painted subjects with lines of poetry, graphic patterns, the students’ art, and soft textures. Her bright, gradient colors seem to emulate the joy she found in creating the body of work, even when the subjects may not be particularly joyful.
“Overall, I think I am trying to ‘praise the mutilated world,’ a phrase from a poem by Adam Zagajewski, that invites the reader to seek out beauty, hope and joy in this beautifully broken world of ours,” Larsen said.
See her portrayal of her beautifully broken surroundings at the Springville Museum of Art through October 22.
