Early in his career, Ben Steele worked a line into a painting that now reads like a permission slip from his early self. From the folds of a fortune cookie, a paper peeks out bearing a Dalí quote: “Those who do not want to imitate anything produce nothing.”
Nearly 20 years ago, Steele stated his right to imitate the work of others, and now his many-layered artworks imitate all of art history, starting with the Old Masters and culminating in the present moment. They trace life from the agricultural age to industrial overproduction. They progress from multicolored childhood to multidisciplinary adulthood.
While Steele considers himself a pop surrealist in terms of mixing and matching subjects, he uses traditional techniques to build layers of color, depth and history on the canvas. By mixing subjects — putting “Girl with a Pearl Earring” by Vermeer on a PEZ dispenser — Steele is layering on the surprises, too. It’s a methodical and technically difficult process, adding one sheet of Vermeer veneer after another, but it makes for fast and furious fun.
“The thing about the old paintings,” Steele muses, “it’s about the attraction to the medium, the process, the thing, the language that’s being spoken.” He’s riffing but stick with him. “To appreciate that they’re speaking at a high level — it’s a highwire act to do that.”
A highwire act. A bold performance. A daring dash down the slopes. In his body of work, Steele hits all the big jumps, smashes the moguls and never loses momentum. It’s a thrilling, furious tear through art history, advertising, pop, regional cultures and tons of technique.
In Park City, Steele’s work is well-known. “His collectors have multiple pieces,” says Jen Schumacher, co-owner of Trove Gallery, where Steele has been showing his work for more than 20 years. Private collectors include actor Steve Carell and sportscaster Dan Patrick. Corporate collectors include Zions Bank and Delta Airlines, which displays Steele’s work in Sky Club lounges throughout the United States.
“A lot of his more savvy collectors will request commissions. They have specific things that ring true to them,” she says. Requests often include nods to Butch and Sundance or John Wayne, aspects of the Wild West fantasy people bring to a mountain experience.
Steele’s relationship with Schumacher reaches back to both of their early careers at CODA Gallery on Main Street, where Schumacher was a gallerist and Steele was newly signed talent. “I watched him grow up,” Schumacher says warmly. “I watched he and [wife] Melanie have their three babies.”
After the passing of the original owners, David and Connie Katz, Schumacher and partner Scott Guiterrez bought CODA and renamed it Trove Gallery. Steele stuck with them, and the images he puts on canvas have stuck firmly with gallery patrons over the years. Schumacher says it’s because his cultural references trigger a deep emotional response.
Steele’s work also can be purchased at galleries in Boston, Palm Desert and Salt Lake City and ski towns including Big Sky, Jackson and Ketchum. Steele’s next show at Trove Gallery runs from December 13-27.
Steele’s earliest works were still life paintings of bottles and chrome objects. He still includes these reflective surfaces in his work, now as seltzer or whiskey bottles, using the labels as an opportunity for a pun. He might depict a Remington bronc on a bottle as an advertisement for horse glue or imagine Park City’s White Barn as the Degas Dairy. The biggest wisecrack he made was The Tattooist, in which Brigham Young poses in the Norman Rockwell illustration of a similar title, getting another wife’s name inked onto his arm without crossing out the previous six.
Steele is aware of the way culture is morphing around him and tries to paint to location. “What do I represent?” He considers the question. “My work was first all about art history and then pop culture; now local culture keeps creeping in more. I feel like I want to lean into that.”
He often transposes masterworks onto images of mass-produced items. One series in this vein is a collection of larger-than-life Etch A Sketches. The red toy frame is made of fiberglass complete with white knobs, and the drawing is done in horizontal and vertical lines with ultra-fine Sharpie paint marker on panel. Steele uses paint washes to create layers mimicking aluminum residue on a screen, so viewers can imagine the many images etched there over the years. His first “etch” was a Rembrandt self-portrait. His newest, focusing on local culture, features Park City ski legend Stein Erickson.
Steele got his formal art education at the University of Utah under John Erickson and Tony Smith. After graduation, he was encouraged to move to Helper, a small desert town in southeastern Utah where he continued his education with David Dornan and Paul Davis. Dornan had purchased a building on Main Street, was hosting fine art workshops and became Steele’s core mentor. Like Dornan, Steele was awarded Utah’s prestigious Governor’s Mansion Award; his was bestowed by Governor Spencer Cox in 2023.
“Everything’s about being a disciple of Dave,” Steele says with a smile that shows no trace of displeasure at crediting the master who taught him, even at this point in his career.
The series Steele is best known for began in 2005, with a painting of crayons against coloring pages of Warhol soup cans. It was inspired by Dornan’s work, which often depicts the supplies in an artist’s studio. “I saw Dave painting paint, and I picked crayons. I thought, he gets to use all that color,” Steele says.
But of course, Steele couldn’t leave it at that. The Crayola series would come to reference absolutely everything, from the abecedarian just learning to color to an ornamental zarf nestled among the Delft porcelain. Steele immediately began depicting DaVinci coloring books and Dalí brand crayons. Over the years, he has colored in the styles of Van Gogh, Maynard Dixon, Kandinsky and Georgia O’Keefe and featured the likenesses of Marilyn Monroe and Robert Redford.
The theme seems to be a good expression of Steele’s inner self. “You can’t suppress personality. It shows up on the canvas,” he says. Being able to mimic very precise academic painters and combining that with the loose and immediate style of the child artiste makes him happy. “I’m feeling like I need to satisfy both of those things,” he says.
An artist of this type might walk the high wire alone every day, but Steele says his work is deeply dependent on the partnership he has with his wife, Melanie. The Steeles plan each show together, making a list of ideas and bantering back and forth about which will most appeal to the audience and which are the most exciting to the painter. Steele says some ideas have been so integrated they can’t remember who came up with them first.
“I’m really grateful that Mel has been along for the whole art journey, right from the start of art school. It feels like it’s truly shared,” he says. “It’s fun to have the history and that connection and to come along together on the ride.”
Their studio in Helper is certainly about being together, designed with room for the whole family to work and hang out. While Steele paints, Oliver, 15, might make a snack in the kitchen; Mel can take care of business on one of the computers; and Andrew, nearly 12, can lounge on the couch after a long day at Helper Middle School. Little Elliot, 4, spends a lot of quality time in his pajamas.
The studio is repurposed from the Helper Mercantile Bottling Plant on the north end of Helper’s Main Street, where the Bergera family bottled beer and soda for many years. The Bergeras’ own collection of bottle caps are proudly displayed in the studio’s entryway, and pop art is now made in their pop bottling factory.
The building’s exterior murals reflect the pride the Steeles, as transplanted locals, feel for the local culture. Near the entry, Steele painted a box of Helper Drawing Crayons. Its box boasts 27 different colors, recalling the number of nationalities represented in Helper in the town’s heyday. The most used crayon from the pack is a stick of coal black worn to the nub.
The north-facing side of the building features trompe l’oeil Post-it notes welcoming visitors to a Helper that’s both historic and modern. The notes suggest visitors “Check out our brothels, company store, 13 bars and gambling,” the things locals remember about their nonconformist Utah town, which was much like Park City during early times. Steele depicts a colored pencil marking out the old town’s features and replacing them with the hallmarks of a modern tourist economy: art, food, coffee, retail, hiking, biking, museum and pool.
Once again, culture morphs around the artist, and he does his best to reflect the transmutation.
Steele has been in Helper as long as he’s been with Trove Gallery, and the Steeles have been an integral part of Helper’s development into an art town. They’ve participated in the Helper Arts Festival, Friday night Gallery Strolls, Christmastown Parade and Dornan’s ongoing annual workshops.
Their gallery space on Main Street — Beg, Borrow and Steele Gallery — was installed as a contribution to the life of Helper, where locals used to working in train yards and coal mines aren’t the first to buy multi-thousand-dollar paintings. So, the gallery sells Steele’s work on stickers, postcards and T-shirts while the original artworks hang on the same walls. This is the permission slip they extend to art lovers of all kinds who like Steele’s paintings and puns.
They recently received a text with a photo of a young woman posing in front of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, holding up a water bottle bearing a sticker of Steele’s Arch de Triomphe, a depiction of Utah’s Delicate Arch as a sandstone stand-in for the Napoleonic icon. His response was pure pleasure. “We’re not wanting art to be something that’s elitist,” Steele says. He and Mel think it’s just as cool that a young person has his work on a water bottle as knowing it’s on the walls of the San Francisco Giants executive offices.
“I like that idea of bringing together things of different eras,” Steele says, “How can we integrate them in some way and make them both talk about the past?” Whether it’s his depictions of the Old Masters, cultural icons or historic Utah towns, Steele says, “We’re talking about our history, which I think everybody wants to do.”
