Review: Documentary 'Bright Spark' looks at artist Trevor Southey, in all his contradictions, and the art movement he started

Quite some time ago, I was invited to a private screening for a work-in-progress documentary about the painter Trevor Southey and a group of his contemporaries — artists who lived in Utah and were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The screening must have been nearly a decade ago, because Southey was still alive at the time, and he died in 2015. 

I don’t recall much about the film then, other than the fact that the filmmaker, Nathan Florence, was very sincere in his desire to finish the film and show the world the movement Southey and the others represented, called “art and belief.”

Florence has finally finished his film, and I’m glad he persevered — because the movie, “Bright Spark: The Reconciliation of Trevor Southey,” is a fitting memorial to Southey’s creativity and gentle spirit, and a call for Latter-day Saint artists to start thinking a little outside the box.

Florence, who co-directed with Matt Black, is a painter himself, and became fascinated with Southey when a retrospective exhibit of his work was shown at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in 2010. So Florence got Southey — who had relocated from Utah to the Bay Area some years earlier — to come to UMFA for an on-camera interview.

The project grew, as Florence captured conversations with the artists Southey — born in what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), but converted to the Latter-day Faith and relocated to Brigham Young University — befriended and argued about art with into the night. 

The group — made up of Southey, painter Gary Ernest Smith, sculptor Neil Hadlock and sculptor Dennis Smith — were all in the Latter-day Saint faith, but they asked a big question: Why doesn’t their church have any great art?

The question gnawed at Southey since 1964, when on his way from Africa to Utah he stopped at the World’s Fair in New York. He visited the Vatican’s pavilion, where Michelangelo’s Pieta was on loan. Then he went to the pavilion for his faith, and was appalled that church leaders “couldn’t see the mediocrity they were creating.”

The problem, Hadlock says in one interview, is that church leaders saw art only as illustration — and refused to consider any art that told its own story or was subject to individual interpretation.

Southey recalls offering his services as an artist to the church. They gave him an assignment to paint a representation of “The First Vision” — the moment when young Joseph Smith, who would go on to found the Latter-day Saint church, first saw a vision of God and Jesus. Southey returned a painting that captured Smith’s doubt and turmoil. Church fathers wanted Southey to go back and redo it, to show the number of buttons on Smith’s jacket. Southey called the moment “soul-destroying.”

The four artists formed a collective based in Alpine, Utah, and eventually thrived as artists, with Southey the most talented of all. But his connection to the Latter-day Saint faith became frayed — and was severed altogether in 1981 when he asked his wife, Elaine, for a divorce because he was hiding his homosexuality.

Southey lost his teaching job at BYU, and was excommunicated.

The “reconciliation” in the film’s title is broadly focused, covering Southey’s personal efforts to reconcile with people in his life and his efforts to square his love for the Latter-day Saint faith with the way his church’s leaders treated him. Florence doesn’t provide answers to those questions, but just raising them turns “Bright Spark” into a thoughtful examination of the contradictions in Southey’s life and art.

——

‘Bright Spark: The Reconciliation of Trevor Southey’

★★★

Opens Friday, January 14, at several Megaplex locations. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for discussions of sexuality and artistic nude images. Running time: 77 minutes.