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By Myrica Hawker
Whitney Leary is the artist who created these pieces. He uses Styrofoam to make abstract rock paintings that he calls "real to life" and art books call "trompe l'oeil," French for "trick the eye." Trompe l'oeil is "a technique that copies nature with such exactitude that the subject depicted can be mistaken for natural forms," according to Art Fundamentals: Theory and Practice. Leary's own life also looks deceptively natural. Born and raised in Salt Lake, Leary now lives in Logan with his wife Heather and their daughter Serin, 1. At age 30, Leary is still an undergraduate art student at Utah State, with some general education requirements left to fulfill. Leary has a bipolar disorder, which he said makes him "a very inconsistent person as far as my moods and my abilities, so I can't hold down a normal 9-to-5 job." Leary is a stay-at-home dad while his wife works at the library. He works on his art in the evenings in his home studio. He said he is a seasonal mood swinger. For him, this means during the fall and spring he is "crazy" and "psychotic," during the summer he is depressed and during the winter he is generally happy and productive. Although, he said this past year everything has been "off wack," particularly the last six months. This has been a challenge to him as an artist since he isn't able to work on his pieces when he is depressed. He is on what he calls a "cocktail" of medications for this disorder. Leary said he spent more time in the mountains than in classrooms while he was in high school. As an avid rock climber, back country skier, hiker and someone who appreciates the wilderness and the desert, Leary gets many of his ideas for pieces from "different facets of nature, like fossils and things that are in rock." "I probably look at the way God has created things in the universe and I try and replicate that in an illusionistic sense," Leary said. "Maybe that's where I fell in love with texture was actually being able to touch rock and later on to go climbing and see rock in certain places that were really unique, and if you took a square out of a certain area there, it had the abstract spaces to make it really beautiful. So, I got the idea of replicating that or trying to or using the same form." His passion for the variety of texture that can be created in a work of art led Leary in an unusual direction. Even though Leary has worked with watercolors, printmaking, photography and computer art, his current interest lies with Styrofoam art. "I really like the idea of having it look real to life but real in texture, and the more texture the better. I could only go so far in creating texture with paint . . . so I thought of a lot of different ways to create or prefabricate texture," Leary said. Leary considered woods, metals and plastics, but ended up choosing Styrofoam, which he said has only been around for about 50 years. "[With Styrofoam] I can do a lot of things to create that texture. I can burn it with chemicals. I can burn it with fire or heat. I can carve it with razor blades or chip it with different tools. I can do a combination of those things," Leary said. While working at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art during his first few years at Utah State, Leary found a piece of packaging Styrofoam and painted it like a big slab of stone. This first piece was on a rubbery Styrofoam, but Leary has since moved to more stiff and rigid types. He doesn't use the white "bead board" type of Styrofoam found in craft stores, but rather blue and pink condensed Styrofoam that is used in walls for insulation. These blue and pink Styrofoam panels in various stages of creation are stacked against the walls of Leary's studio, which is a bedroom-sized room in the back of his house with white walls and a vaulted ceiling. A wood platform covers most of the floor, built by Leary to cover a pool that is no longer used. The floors, shelves and table are covered with supplies such as plastic Gatorade containers filled with sands and stones he collected in southern Utah and halves of clear plastic globe ornaments that can be found in craft stores. As he did with the backgrounds of the panels in the Eccles Science Learning Center, Leary crushes the sand, mixes it with a clear poly-acrylic paint and paints the mixture onto the Styrofoam. The insides of the globe ornaments are painted with metallic colors, and the ornaments are stuck on Styrofoam cubes and rectangles. Leary uses all types of paint. He takes a can of spray paint and crouches to spray it at eye level on a panel, his disheveled shoulder-length, reddish-blond hair falling across his face. After a few minutes, the clearish paint has slowly eaten away at the Styrofoam where it was sprayed. Another panel is painted in a deep green scale-like pattern, with bare Styrofoam showing through the cracks between the shapes. Leary begins panels with latex paint since its water base allows other treatments to be applied over it without distorting the Styrofoam. He paints areas he doesn't want to melt because Styrofoam is more susceptible to condensing than paint is. He has used a blow torch to heat the Styrofoam, but now opts for the safer heat dryer gun, which is basically a high heat hair dryer. He integrates a variety of materials with the Styrofoam. One piece has a flashlight and mirror to refract light back and forth, visible through yellow, blue and red color gels over holes. He pulled apart computers found at Desert Industries and threw them into his back yard to rust so he can make a piece with fossilized-looking computer parts. He has put sound in some of his pieces, such as what he says is weird electronic music like "bibbles, burps and farts" he made on the computer. "I come up with my own things that I want to express and my own ways of expressing them, so everything I'm doing is completely unique. I try and maintain that as much as possible. I think that's pretty cool to be as self-creative as possible," Leary said. "There are people who really try and break the edge of art and what hasn't been done, and that's sort of the area that I'm in." Leary said reactions to his art have all been very positive, which is comforting even though he said he would like some criticism because he feeds off negativity. Matt Cardis, 23, a student walking through the ESLC said that even though Leary's pieces weren't his type of art since he prefers painting, he can appreciate the imagination this art work takes. "He's very creative to come up with this concept. I still don't see how it's Styrofoam," Cardis said. "I find the more he works with the medium, he'll find a way to express what he's feeling," said Jared Nielsen, 28, a fellow artist and print making major who has know Leary for nine years. "I like how he puts hidden meanings and symbols and things in there that you don't see unless you're ready to see them," Nielsen said. Besides the work displayed at USU, Leary has sold a few other pieces to acquaintances. He sold the panels to USU for $800, which he says was a deal, even if it is the most he has made for a piece. He said he would have sold it for no less than $4,000 or $5,000 if he had made it for a professional company. Recently, Leary has had his work displayed in a show in Salt Lake called the Artists in Utah Exhibit. He also applied for a gallery spot for the first time, and got it. He will be one of three artists displaying their work in the Rose Wagner Art Center in Salt Lake from July through mid-September. In the future, Leary would like to branch out to film making and on-site art installation, such as the spiral jetty created with large machines on the Great Salt Lake. "This is a good age to be an artist, a good age to be alive," Leary said.
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