SALT LAKE CITY
Focusing on the first retail portion to open in downtown Salt Lake City's City Creek development, a press conference was held in its food court Tuesday morning, Feb. 9.
The food court has actually been open for several months, but it is steadily expanding in a bit of obscurity. With the ongoing construction of the massive City Creek multi-use development dominating two downtown blocks, the food court, currently with five vendors, is accessible only through an entrance on State Street between South Temple and 100 South and from the Eagle Gate and Key Bank office buildings on each side of it. Four more vendors are scheduled to open during the spring.
City Creek has been "a real marathon, and today … we are now passing the 20-mile mark of this marathon," said Mark B. Gibbons, president of City Creek Reserve, Inc., the Church's arm that oversees the development. "We've received our second wind. The end is in sight and we're excited about the things that are coming."
Along with the food court, the remodeled lobby of the KeyBank Tower and parking underneath have been opened. The rest of the project is on schedule, he said.
The major components of City Creek are being built on the block, previously the site of Crossroads Mall, immediately south of Temple Square, and the block, previously the site of the ZCMI Center, immediately south of the Church Administration Building. The Church is developing the property it owns to revitalize and improve the appearance of Salt Lake City's downtown.
City Creek is billed as a "walkable, sustainably-designed urban community of residences, offices and retail stores," according to press materials. Brother Gibbons said the first of the residential components — Richard's Court, directly across the street from Temple Square — will open within the next six weeks. The rest of the project is on schedule to be completed with the opening of the retail component in early 2012.
The unveiling of a mural at the State Street entrance to the food court was also part of the press conference. The mural by local artist David Meikle titled "Wasatch Grandeur" depicts a spectacular late afternoon view of the mountains southeast of downtown following a spring rainstorm.
Brother Meikle of the Foothill 3rd Ward, Salt Lake Foothill Stake, commissioned to do the large painting, completed it in two and a half months. He said that it was a major construction project of about 80-90 man-hours to put it in place.
Painter David Meikle's small basement studio is void of any natural light. Eschewing titles about art greats such as Caravaggio or J.M.W. Turner, his bookshelves instead hold volume after volume about aviation and sci-fi movie set illustration.
You won't find a John Coltrane or Mozart CD in his rack, but loads of Peter Gabriel, U2 and Rush. And his paining starts at 9 p.m., once his four children are fast asleep.
Meikle, a 40-year-old Salt Lake City landscape painter, betrays almost every standard trait the public expects of fine artists.
But there's little argument that Meikle's art work has arrived, thanks to one work currently sharing the same wall space with Maynard Dixon and Edgar Payne at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, plus his largest commissioned painting, soon to be unveiled at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' City Creek development under construction downtown.
A career in painting wasn't always part of the plan. For Meikle, it's work that comes first, even when it comes to art. His job as senior graphic designer at the University of Utah's marketing and communication office, a position he's held ever since graduating in 1994 with a degree in graphic design and illustration from the same school, made him comfortable with production budgets, deadlines and schedules.
It was encouragement from his wife, Lacy Egbert, that got him started on the road to an MFA in painting at the U., which he completed in 2006.
Meikle's working style didn't always sit well. One professor derided his palette, an assortment of colors stacked, like a stalagmite in a cave, high enough to topple. "He held it up as an example and told the other students, 'Don't do your palette like this!' " Meikle remembers.
The palette of his finished paintings, though, is another matter.
"He's a brilliant colorist," said Donna Poulton, curator of Utah and Western art at UMFA, who selected Meikle's "View of Zion" for "Continuing Allure," the museum's current exhibit of landscape paintings. "His palette always works. There's nothing off about it."
Poulton also praised Meikle's eye for perspective and what she calls "architectural" approach to achieving a unique vision.
"There's a lot of geometry in [his work] and that, in turn, makes it more modern," she said. "So even though it's representational, his paintings really hit you. Every time I see a David Meikle painting, I recognize it as a David Meikle painting."
His technique, Meikle said, is about homework. Understanding the difference between detail and exact placement of the right color is also key.
He's dedicated to making paintings that don't look "overworked," but have power through how elements are implied. The full effect is apparent in "Visions of Zion," which captures layer upon layer of distance and shadow.
"I love it when I can see distances going back and back and back," he said. "Anytime I can get that in a painting, that's when I get really excited about what I'm doing."
Translating his unique vision to both small and large works proved to be an interesting challenge, and the leap necessary to securing his largest and most public commission ever. His new work, to be unveiled next week, hangs inside the under-construction City Creek Food Court.
The commission was years in the making, dating back to an art sale in 2003. That's when Joshua Stewart, a graduate of the University of Utah's architecture school, bought one of Meikle's small-scale works. Years later, when Stewart moved back to Salt Lake City from Portland, Ore., to work on the City Creek development, he recommended Meikle's work to supervisors interested in commissioning art.
At 10 feet high by 23 feet wide, Meikle's painting required on-site construction of a frame and a panel, constructed of nine sheets of plywood. A traditional framing, instead of adhering the work to a panel, would have left the painting vulnerable to sagging under the pull of gravity. That, as a result, would have led to cracks in the oil paint.
"It's like hanging a small car on a wall or, in this case, a flat-bed trailer," said Travis Tanner, who oversaw the hanging of Meikle's painting.
Tanner was impressed at how adeptly Meikle switched gears to finish the large-scale work, while preserving the qualities of his smaller paintings. "It's a real triumph for him to make that happen," Tanner said.
Some well-known artists were known to be particular about where, and to whom, their work might be shown. Most famously, abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko was tormented over whether he could complete a highly paid commission for the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan's Seagram Building. In the end, he decided against it. For Rothko, the thought of people chewing food beneath his works was too much to bear.
Meikle, by contrast, has no qualms about his most grand work yet sharing the same space with a food-court McDonald's.
"Anyone who knows me will think that fits pretty well, because I like McDonald's a lot," he said. "What was so exciting to me about this is that it's meant for a public space. I don't know if I take myselfso seriously that I wouldn't want my work displayed near a restaurant."
