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The first time art instructor Woody Shepherd saw a new painting by student Trevin Prince, he leaned over. Not so he could get a closer look, but because knowing the painting was made of his student's blood made him feel queasy.
"I had to get up, get a drink of water and not look at it again for a minute," said Shepherd, an assistant professor of painting and drawing at Utah State University. "It made me lightheaded just thinking of it."
Prince, a 26-year-old painter who lives in Logan with his wife, doesn't gloat over the fact that his work -- plasma on Plexiglas -- provoked such a reaction. He doesn't downplay it, either.
"Most people are either inspired by it or disgusted by it," Prince says. "Either way that's fine by me, because I know they'll remember my work."
Prince's crimson images may stir similar responses for those who peruse the Utah Arts Festival artists' marketplace June 25 through 28, when his work will be displayed inside the main festival entrance at 200 East and 400 South, Salt Lake City.
The scarlet, wine, cherry and maroon tones of Prince's images encased in Plexiglas and sealed with resin don't come from globules on a palette. They come instead from the marrow of the artist's bones, through a vein in his left arm, into a syringe, and either straight onto a Plexiglas surface while bright red, or onto a refrigerator shelf where they grow darker with time.
"Almost all artists pour their heart into a work," Prince said. "I was reaching for more. I wanted to pour myself onto the surface, so literally reached into something that was a part of me."
The process of creation is entirely his own: laying down layer after layer of blood in particular image, then sealing each layer in its individual coat of resin before applying a final, ultraviolet layer of resin to protect each work from light.
In the contemporary art world, the impulse to use bodily fluids or even flesh in artworks isn't that unusual. At least since 1946, that is, when iconoclastic French artist Marcel Duchamp used his own semen to create the abstract composition "Faulty Landscape." Andy Warhol created an "Oxidation Series" of paintings in 1978 by urinating on canvases primed with copper-based paint. British bad-boy artist Damien Hirst's 1993 work of a cow and calf cut in half, "Mother and Child Divided," won him Britain's prestigious Turner Prize two years later.
Prince speaks calmly about his chosen material. After more than 18 months of working with blood, the artist thinks he's hit his stride, saying the more he works with blood, the more it grows as a passion. An active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who listens to Johnny Cash and reads Harry Potter, he rejects any notion that he paints with blood as a gimmick or any attempt to feed a hidden "dark side." "I'm drawn to the qualities I'm able to capture with blood, how it reacts with light, and how it binds with the Plexiglas," he said.
Older members of the festival's eight-member jury selecting works for the festival were at first startled by Prince's work, said Savana Jones, a jury member and vice president of the Utah Photographic Arts Council. In the end, almost all of them ended up impressed. "Some on the jury were freaked out by it. You could definitely use blood to get at something abstract, but the way he used it to render images was amazing," Jones said.
Human blood isn't a medium Prince chose just for shock value. In a way, and over time, blood chose him. Growing up in a family with two registered nurses, his mother and his sister, dinner conversation was full of stories about surgeries and emergency-room traumas. Suffering frequent nosebleeds as a child, he stood over the bathroom sink as droplets fell and then bloomed across white porcelain into ultra-vivid shapes. The sight of a family horse being put down by a vet who drew in blood from a vein in the animal's neck before an injection haunted him.
The content of his paintings stay close to their form. "Against the Wind" depicts the futility of resisting mortality through the image of a man extending his right arm, its hand blasted of flesh, against some mysterious onslaught of destruction. More recent works dwell on the womb and life's beginnings.
Finding techniques and materials to match and complement his O-positive blood type wasn't easy. Or, as Prince explains it: "There's not really a how-to book out there on how to do this."
A solo attempt at drawing his own blood pushed the needle too far, causing internal bleeding and a bruise so large it caught his mother's attention. His explanation puzzled more than disturbed her.
"I was relieved to find out that he wasn't doing something else," said mother Lori Peterson, a nurse living in Mendon, Utah. "I have to admit I was even a little concerned about what other people would think. But I said, 'If you're going to do something like that, it needs to be clean in every respect -- no biohazards.' " And then she gladly offered her services for future draws, as did his sister.
Treating his blood with heparin to prevent clotting, Prince first tried applying it to canvas. Not only did the color fade. It flaked away.
A combination of his mother's insistence on medical safety and his own search for a surface that would hold and preserve blood's brilliance led Prince to Plexiglas. Prince uses syringe and needles to paint not for some gimmicky effect, but because conventional brushes absorb too much blood. Painting, and then applying sealing coats of resin over the top, creates a layered dimension, an effect he hopes to push even deeper toward a three-dimensional feel.
"There's an interesting conversation happening in his work between the medium he uses and the images and illusions he's creating with the medium of blood," said Shepherd, who in chaperoning Prince's talent has helped him get over his phobia of blood. "[Prince's paintings] almost resemble petri dishes or layers of blown glass, creating an interior, internal space much like a body. He's onto something, but still experimenting."
As profound as the medium is to him, blood has one glaring limitation: its stand-alone quality. Prince also paints with oil on occasion, and blood, being essentially water, doesn't mix with oil.
Peterson said her son still asks her medical questions, such as how much of his blood can be safely drawn at one time. "I have at times wished he could use a different medium, but it's definitely intriguing -- the reactions he gets with the resins," she said.
Prince said he'd love to paint portraits of friends in the future, granted he can use their blood. Most of them are hesitant, he said, but a few are thinking about it. He's thinking ahead about what it will take to create large-scale works. "I'll definitely need to find some donors," he said.
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