Just after arriving in New Zealand, Jacob Shirley landed a gig painting graffiti for a local theater company.

Humble as that may seem, it is just one tiny facet of an extensively rich portfolio for this Salt Lake City native who admits that he was a horrible art student but who nonetheless has conscientiously developed his aesthetic capabilities to communicate in compelling ways through his independent art milieu as well as his emerging career in urban planning.

Jake certainly has struck a synergistic balance between his serious persona – reflected in the training and experience which led him to completing a bachelor’s degree in urban planning at the University of Utah last spring – and his artistic voice which ambles smoothly between a thoughtful challenge to authority and conventionality and whimsical expressions often created for the sheer amusement of his friends.

His artistic beginnings, too, were humble. “I always sketched as a kid,” he recalls. “School, church or anywhere else that kids usually got bored I would doodle on whatever paper was nearby. In high school I was sketching in my black book – I upgraded from scratch paper – and some of my classmates said I should be a tattoo artist. But the idea of touching random strangers in random places kind of creeped me out.”

His teachers apparently were unimpressed by his stubbornness and the results. “One assignment was to draw with graphite a head on an 11×17 piece of paper,” he says. “The teacher was less than impressed when I came back with an 18×24 inch sprayed acrylic painting.”

Graduating from Olympus High School in 1999, however, gave Jake the opportunity to widen his creative vehicles for expression while he contemplated what type of college program would best suit his needs. Even when he was a freshman in high school, some friends suggested he should try his hand at graffiti. “One night my sister and a friend took me to buy some paint, and we painted a wall – and very badly – and it was so exhilarating,” he explains. “So I tried again and again, trying different paints and caps and walls. Each time more exciting than last. Every day I wanted to try a new technique and it just evolved from there.”

Sometimes, Jake’s art arises from the interface of competition and inspiration as it did for a skate deck design competition where he wanted to find a “new F word” but he struggled to discover a word that would rattle and shock most people’s sensibilities – a not-so-surprisingly difficult challenge considering that so many expletives echo as innocuous white noise today. “So instead, on one skate deck, I wrote ‘hamburger’ which is Japanese slang for a fat American,” he adds. He also has experimented in renegade art – “Fall Out Shelter” – in which he placed barrels marked with toxic waste warnings around the Energy Solutions Arena in downtown Salt Lake City, shortly after the controversial firm took reins of the multipurpose facility from Delta Airlines.

Jake’s complex, layered voice is evoked in the diverse media in which he works comfortably – from the crispness in his letter and figure graphics of his graffiti art to the rather surprisingly sophisticated tempered lighting and shadowing effects in his acrylic canvases.

Now settling into New Zealand with his wife Jeni, Jake will continue to explore his artistic voice while pursuing his career in master planned community development. “My artistic statement has always been fluid but I always work on the premise that art is a process, not a product,” he explains. “For me the enjoyment is in the creation, not the result. People shouldn’t be in art galleries, they should be in art studios because that is really where the art is.”