A brush with greateness: Local artist Benjamin McPherson
Have you heard the one about the teenager who saw the face of the Blessed Virgin in a tomato (a tortilla, a peanut butter sandwich, a head of cabbage)fi Peggy Avery saw the entire Last Supper in a carpet.
Avery, who lives in Farmington, N.M., is the mother of painter and Provo resident Benjamin McPherson. McPherson’s painting “And It Was Night,” depicts Jesus Christ and his closest followers in a scene similar to Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting “The Last Supper.” It was reproduced for the cover of the August issue of the Ensign, a monthly magazine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
On Oct. 12, the original work will go on permanent display at Provo’s Brownstone Gallery, with a public reception held that evening to unveil the second in a series of six religious paintings depicting the life of Christ. (The new painting is of Peter attempting to walk to Jesus over the turbulent surface of the Sea of Galilee.)
“And It Was Night” was something McPherson, 30, had envisioned in his head and the first time he showed it to his mother he traced the entire scene in her carpet with his finger.
“He was in Farmington visiting,” Avery said. McPherson told her about his next project, and then used her floor to demonstrate exactly how he hoped to lay out all the elements of the familiar scene.
The next time that Avery had a glimpse of the project, McPherson had painted the stone wall of the “upper room” where Christ met with his apostles on the night of his momentous visit to the Garden of Gethsemane, and filled in the first four apostles, arrayed on the left half of his canvas.
“I remember going into the studio” to see how things were progressing, Avery said. “We probably sat there for five hours staring at the painting.”
When you talk to other people who have seen “And It Was Night,” you get the sense that some level of profound appreciation is a common response to McPherson’s work.
When he first saw the painting, said Kerry Ashby, who attends Sunday meetings in the same Latter-day Saint congregation as McPherson, “I was absolutely dumbfounded by the quality.”
At least some of the thousands of visitors who saw “And It Was Night” while it was displayed at the Museum of Church History and Art in Salt Lake City had a similar reaction. The exhibition, recently closed, included a selection of entries from the LDS Church’s Seventh International Art Competition.
McPherson’s was one of just three works to receive a Visitors Choice award — 235 of more than 900 total entries were chosen for the exhibit — and the only one of the three to also be honored by contest jurors with a Merit Award.
Ray Halls, a curator at the museum, said that the Last Supper has special meaning for Latter-day Saints because it included the first observance of the sacrament, a religious ritual that Mormons practice each week. McPherson’s painting, he said, adds to that spiritual significance because of its thoughtful representation of those present.
“The individual apostles have so much character,” Halls said. “It’s an absolutely beautiful painting.”
Doing it his own way
At least some of the striking realism of “And It Was Night” (the title is a citation from John 13:30 in the New Testament) is probably the result of a unique aspect of McPherson’s approach to painting it. Several of the men who modeled the scene were recruited during visits to a shelter for the homeless in Salt Lake City.
McPherson, who paints full time, said that he wanted his finished work to provide “a sense of the reality of the moment.”
The men at the shelter, he said, tended to have beards and a weather-beaten look that hinted at rough living conditions similar to those familiar to Jesus and his followers. As McPherson sees it, Jesus and the men closest to him traveled largely afoot and tended to rely on the hospitality of others for food and shelter.
“The apostles and the Savior, during his ministry, were living a similar lifestyle” to the homeless of today, he said.
It might not be the first thing that most people would think of, but Avery said that her son has never been one to take a conventional approach. “He just has his own definite idea about his technique,” she said.
It’s been that way all along. McPherson said that he never took an art class until he was in high school. And even then he didn’t pay much attention to the “correct” methods explained in class.
“He didn’t ever follow instructions or do things the way that they wanted him to,” Avery said. McPherson’s teachers, she said, would exclaim over the excellence of his work, but also tell her that they didn’t know how his creations turned out as well as they did.
In particular, Avery remembers a charcoal portrait of Albert Einstein that her son did while in the 10th grade. “I thought that was the beginning of something,” she said.
McPherson said that one of his high school teachers helped arrange small commissions for him during the summers. “I did a little portrait work,” he said. “I got a chance to work as an artist long before most people do.”
His most important commission came about when he took a regular old house-painting job from a client, Lola Brown, who lived in a large home built to mimic the shape of a medieval castle. McPherson suggested that one expansive interior wall would be ideally suited to a mural. Intrigued, Brown asked McPherson whether he could create such a mural himself — which he could, and did, over the course of four months.
“It was kind of a massive undertaking,” he said, but “ultimately the project went really well.”
So well, in fact, that McPherson went back to Brown several years later — after finishing high school, serving an LDS proselytizing mission to South Africa and spending two years after returning home illustrating books for young readers — to ask about the possibility of another commission.
This time, his former patron told him she had a religious piece hung over her bed that she’d gotten tired of. She asked him whether he thought he could paint a “working class” version of the Last Supper.
The idea stuck in his head and eventually became “And It Was Night,” which, following a period of careful preparation, took him three months to complete. The finished work is oil-on-canvas … mostly. McPherson said that the areas of the painting that appear white are the canvas itself.
“I used a technique where I used different linseed oils and different mediums to thin out the paint and make it translucent,” he said.
He also used deep shades of black to fill in behind the traitorous apostle Judas, seen leaving the room on the far left of the painting (the title of the painting refers to the moment of Judas’s departure, as noted in the New Testament in John 13:30).
“When you dim the lights on the painting,” McPherson said, “Judas disappears. You have Judas exiting the room and the camaraderie coming back. You get a sense of what was happening.”
’A piece of history’
The first opportunity for McPherson to exhibit his “working class” Last Supper came about through Lee Cowan, who teaches art at Utah Valley State College and has a frame shop in Springville. After being referred to the shop by a friend, McPherson asked Cowan whether he’d be willing to come to his studio and look at the painting he’d just finished.
Cowan said that he’s not often moved by religious-themed art, in part because he sees so much of it. “I think the main reason is that I see too much exploitation of religious iconology,” he said. “I don’t like that.”
That might lead one to suspect that Cowan would be at least a little bit skeptical of “And It Was Night,” but his reaction turned out to be much the same as that of so many others.
“I was blown away by it,” he said. “It was just amazing work.”
The two men soon arranged for “And It Was Night” to be exhibited at the (now defunct) Cowan Gallery in Springville, where it was shown for several months.
The response, Cowan said, was “overwhelming. Everyone who walked in the door was just overcome by it.”
Despite the resounding success of that first public showing, McPherson hadn’t even considered entering the LDS Church competition until it was suggested to him by his wife’s grandmother.
And despite having been told repeatedly that his painting was special, McPherson didn’t enter expecting to win anything.
“We could have never imagined what the response would be,” he said.
That might sound like false modesty. Ashby, who makes cabinets and furniture and is McPherson’s LDS home teaching partner, said it’s really just who McPherson is. When he first learned that his friend has done a painting of the Last Supper, Ashby said, “I about had to threaten to break his legs to get him to show it to me.”
McPherson sells prints of “And It Was Night” through his Web site, benjaminfineart.com, and he’s made enough of a reputation for himself that he could afford to take a trip to Italy to research fishing vessels and make other preparations to paint Peter’s trial of faith on the Sea of Galilee.
Avery said that her son has gotten to that point by doing any sort of work he could get that would allow him to stay in his chosen career path. And he’s given up certain things at times. For example, she said, “sometimes food. We try not to let that happen too often.”
For now, he’s gotten enough artistic and financial leeway that he can put scaffolding in Utah Lake to model walking on water in the most accurate way that he can (“I had these guys standing on the scaffolding at 3 a.m., waiting for the sun to come up”), or construct full-size crosses for a planned depiction of the Crucifixion.
That’s a lot of work just to get a better idea of what something might have looked like. Or perhaps not — as McPherson put it, “I feel like an artist needs to take reality as far as he can before he starts inserting imagination into the process.”
Ashby is one who believes that the exactitude will pay off. He built a cherry wood frame for the new painting, titled “Wherefore Didst Thou Doubtfi,” and is excited to see it exhibited.
“It’s an honor to be able to be part of a piece of history,” Ashby said. “Because that painting is going to be around for generations.”
Cody Clark can be reached at 344-2542 or cclark@heraldextra.com.
This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A1.