---

Introduction
Robert Flynn Johnson
Curator in Charge
Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

The pursuit of truth in one's life and art often leads to conflict in one's self and conftontation with others. It is the very reason why most individuals choose the path of least resistance, paved with the stones of status quo, leading to predictable consensus.

					MOM Collection of the artist 14.5 x 19 inches, acrylic on panel. 1970
	DAD Collection of the artist 14.5 x 19 inches, acrylic on panel. 1970

Trevor Southey, however, is a man who has risked much in putting into practice his personal and artistic vision of life. This thoughtful memoir is neither laudation nor apologia. Instead, Southey gives insight into his art by recollecting his life's journey up to this point. Regardless of one's ultimate judgment of his life or art, one must marvel at the candor of Trevor Southey in an age of evasion and fault deflection.

There is something of the unintentional yet perpetual renegade in Trevor Southey. The early circumstances of his life in Africa were the least hospitable imaginable for nurturing one into becoming an artist, yet he persevered and succeeded. He matured as an artist in an era that scorned the representation of the human figure almost as much as it despised the depiction of emotional content within a composition. Southey turned his back on the momentary trends of the art world, seeing them as a distraction. Instead, he sought solace and inspiration in the vision of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and William Blake.

NANNY 24 x 14 inches, etching. 1969			JOHNNY AND AGNUS Collection of Zimbabwe National Gallery, Harare 30 x 40 inches, oil on panel. 1961

Oscar Wilde once wrote, "One's real life is often the life that one does not lead." So it was with Trevor Southey. His personal evolution with regard to religious beliefs, marriage, family, and sexual identity are revealed here. Southey expresses this evolution with an openness that exposes the struggle he went through in seeking that life that was real to him.

Despite the struggles most artists must deal with in life, there is a silver lining to their existence. The majority of men live on only in the memory of those who knew and loved them. A form of immortality, however, is bestowed on artists through the continued existence of their art and its ability to affect others. The career of Trevor Southey is still an ongoing journey. This volume looks back on an admirable body of work, achieved not without personal and professional sacrifice. It equally anticipates works of art yet to come in a distinguished career.

					NEW BLOOM II 14.5 x 21 inches, etching. 1980
	BROTHER'S KEEPER 15 x 15 x 15 inches, bronze. 1973
						SPRING Collection of Day and Jenni Christensen, Pleasant Grove, Utah 8 x 10 inches, oil on panel. 1976

---

Reconciliation
Trevor Southey

Beatrix Potter is certainly a factor. So are Disney, Hollywood, Tarzan and Jane, Rock Hudson and Doris Day, Broadway musicals, the book of Genesis, "Zion," and also the Holocaust. All resonate so with this person who has trekked about the world looking for Eden. I, this person, am more fully awake to the paradoxical aspects of my reality in my mid-fifties than ever. I find I am still assuming the very best of the most unlikely dreams, even though my faith in humankind is more ambiguous.

Still, although as an adult I know it is silly, it is a symbol of a kind of hope to believe that animals dress up in human clothes and deal with each other in a civil way. I can barely watch the ever more remarkable and, I might add, uncivil documentaries of predator and prey which haunt the air waves. As far as I am concerned, it's time for the lamb and the lion to get with the program! These words, it must be sheepishly admitted, come from the mind of a carnivore! Ah well, such is the dream, and such is part of the vitality and reality.

The rest of the vitality seethes and blends too. My child sleeping, Jesus, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Shakespeare . . . a crumbling, mossy wall, a fern, a goldfish, a piece of lace, an old sepia photograph of my grandparents, an I.M. Pei building . . .

		GODDESS Collection of Dr. Mark and LaFaunda Curtis, Salt Lake City 48 x 72 inches, oil on panel. 1995

There is a photograph of my mother and myself. It is very revealing, though the imperfect skills of the photographer may have contributed to the sense of uncertainty, as the figures lean on the tilted ground. My mother's feet are placed together, her plain cotton dress buttoned form neck to knee. She smiles in frank confidence of her essential beauty, though her hair is thin and parted with casual style. She is a young woman, evidently of few means but firm conviction.

I am a skinny boy, perhaps age seven or so. I lean in toward my mother as if regretting ever having left the safety of her womb. I stare out of sunken, dark eye sockets, serious, a deep sense of my peculiarity already clear in my bearing. From the outset I did not fit well into the larger world. My mother and family, especially the women, secured any sense of well being I had at all. My essential timidity and then my illness justified my clinging to her and her powerful, protective certainty. She was a fierce, strong woman.

My father was off to war, and after that off in his difficult world of survival, a world always challenging to his kind and gentlemanly soul.

UNION Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Wyatt Canaday, Virginia 36 x 48 inches, oil on panel. 1972

I have been keeping journals since I was eighteen. This was not only because I needed somehow to maintain a grip on what was already a very absent mind, but in writing I was early trying to deal with my Eden search in a inarticulate way, not even really aware that the search was on.

Although I do love to write, I freely acknowledge that a really disciplined writer I am not, which is probably also true of my life and my art. Furthermore, I am by nature and by culture reticent, even self-effacing in an old-fashioned British way. Because of that, a conscious and subconscious self-censorship for fear of hurting others or "unsuitably" exposing myself may have prevailed. That single photograph tells more of the truth about my personality than any writing I have ever done. Yet, I have slipped up sometimes and the whole story surfaces more and more as I have grown older. In this writing, but mostly in my work, it is clear that this story will be told whether I feel comfortable with that or not. Increasingly I do.

This book has come together in much the same way that my art does and is related to the way in which I write my journals. It has been in itself a discovery of the fullness of my art, seen as a collected body of work.

The evolution of my life, and my place in the world, has been an endless series of cycles of discovery and rediscovery, inexorably accompanied by painful awareness of change and decay. This, of course, is true for many, though there are perhaps even more for whom the process is just too painful. For them there is a closing down into various opiates of obliviousness, sometimes early in life, sometimes late. In some ways they are blessed. Ignorance can be bliss. Too often it is also very dangerous.

		DISCIPLE detail Collection of St. Patrick Hospital, Missoula, Montana 133 x 96 inches, stained glass. 1983

This turning upon oneself, which has become my way of growing, I like to compare to the stability and brilliance, if apparent monotony, of the purity of primary colour. In this self-focused solitude there is much to be learned. But when the turning includes others, the result is the powerful and subtle prismatic blending of two or more "wheels" of primary colours spinning in and out of one another. The resulting prism occasionally explodes into the white light of "truth" or insight. If stared at too long, white light can blind one. As in all paradox, there is never a perfect place except in the ideal of movement itself. Thus my work has turned out to be a form of personal exploration, an autobiographical sorting out of the soul. But this result was never a defined goal.

In expressing these thoughts, I freely acknowledge my "fall from grace," my umpurity as a visual artist as I believe it to be defined by the art establishment. However, I think I largely redeem myself as an artist by the honest, albeit usually inadvertent, telling of the tale. Most frequently the thinking and feeling is born of the visual process. The work is not an illustration, but an exploration. All of this may appear hardly relevant to the experience of art. There is perhaps too much verbiage on the subject. Certainly there has been too much which tends to box in or close down the artist whose direction happens not to suit the arbiters of taste. By dint of indolence or the good fortune of geography and personal place in time, I have been able to remain somewhat independent of that power. So in the end there is a quaint authenticity to what is presented here, naive perhaps, but also stubbornly honest.
			ORDINATION Collection of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 48 x 48 inches, acrylic on panel. 1966

Intellectually, I might have remained wantonly ignorant of the art world. But emotionally and visually—and this is revealed in some of the "vocabulary" of form which I think I absorbed by a process of osmosis—I have been part of my time and age while seeming to be a maverick or even reactionary. There are many colleagues of this age whose work resonates deeply with me. I will never forget, as I walked alone among the works of British painter Francis Bacon, the visceral way in which he seemed to disembowel my soul. I remember vividly the quickening of my being as I felt the power of his form, his ruthless imagery, branding the actuality of my personal pain on the trembling surfaces of those "entrails."

But my primary experience and vision are radically different. That they center on the romantic optimism of one human experience, as opposed perhaps to the apparent pessimism of another, makes them no less legitimate. One does not have to beat the viewer over the head to prove that one is not a phony. If the record of "serious" art in this century is assessed, there is little room for an art of beauty in the traditional sense, or optimism, or romance. This book reveals that I have largely failed the test of the modern "academy." I do not regret that failure.

I have also relished my connection and debt emotionally and creatively to those from the past who almost incidentally have been my teachers, the great masters of the Italian Renaissance, and quieter masters of Northern Europe like Vermeer, even idiosyncratic Victorian masters like the Pre-Raphaelites, who are perhaps closest to my own spirit of strange romantic denial. Works like Ophelia or Christ in the House of His Parents by John Everett Millais are extraordinarily sentimental to modern eyes but deeply compelling to me. In spite of the fact that each subject is imbued with a sense of melancholy or is pregnant with tragedy which is somehow beyond belief, the sheer, precious, almost sacred deliberation which the artists used to render their insights projects these works into the realm of greatness for me. It is not really surprising given the gentle nature of the child I had been.

		AT DAWN Collection of Charles, Lord Brocket, Welwyn, England 24 x 36 inches, oil on canvas. 1991

During my fist exposure to these works in the Tate Gallery in London, I would visit them in their dark basement corner of disgrace, almost clandestinely for fear of the ridicule of my colleagues. Today these paintings hang proud and central in the museum. Exposure to the work of these artists did not include any conscious assimilation or study; but over time, sometimes decades later, they seemed to emerge in some work of my own.

That Bacon and the Pre-Raphaelites should spring to mind to illustrate my point of view is indicative of more than a very eclectic taste. It reveals a reluctance to take a stand, a pleasure in reflecting the breadth of viewpoints at the expense of commitment to some current enthusiasm of the cutting edge. It also reveals a unwilling and late blooming resignation to the brutality of so much of life.

Ultimately, the commitments I have surface almost unbidden in the art which I produce. This includes the impact of many varied artists from the past and present who might have registered in my mind, I cheerfully acknowledge the debt which I have to my "teachers," and accept the consequences. While an underlying shadow of dread will surface, as it should in as treacherous an experience as that of life on this planet, I tend to naturally reflect on the moments of loveliness and beauty, even at the risk of seeming maudlin by modern standards. This is almost a prayer, a yearning.

		LAKESHORE 15.5 x 24 inches, etching. 1982

Of course this response does not preclude the thought of the "ugly" ultimately being called "beauty," simply because of increased familiarity. Nor does it deny that a form can be made beautiful simply by its revelation of vicious and painful truth. Although I am easily bruised by it, I try to demand of myself full consciousness of natural process, of timeless integration and evolution, decay, violence, holocaust. I know nature and humanity to be as relentlessly unkind as they are beautiful.

I believe that just as most of the anatomy of the body remains thankfully contained beneath the skin, so beneath the skin of my work seethes a sense of the whole, not quickly apparent at first glance, but vital nonetheless.

At a time when legitimacy is bestowed easily on those who seek to shock or indulge only in formal "masturbation," or even those whose toying with noodles will garner admiring titters, an artist like me perhaps needs to explain himself. Words may help. But ultimately it is the work which must speak in the language of sight and insight.

So, here I am at middle age, an artist who really does not have a clear place in the art of the modern world. For me, the more important place is that of those who have come upon my work and find themselves compelled, touched, and growing because of it. This is my place.

							SHADOW 22 x 30 inches, etching. 1988
	VINE 13 x 16.5 inches, lithograph. 1996
						FLIGHT 28 x 20 inches, etching. 1979