One art professor described his style as primitive-realist, and his paintings have a dream-like quality that is focused on idealized human figures.

After a year, he left to serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Denmark.

[3] Kershisnik is one of the best-known contemporary Utah artists, and his work relates the mundane to the divine.

The way his complex figures contrast with their unadorned settings gives his paintings a dreamlike quality.

He uses unusually large or small objects and textual inscriptions to heighten the otherworldly sense in his paintings.

[11] Disheveled Saint depicts a scruffy man wearing a T-shirt, showing Kershisnik's belief that ordinary people can be holy.

[15] He sums up his artistic philosophy in the following statement: There is great importance in successfully becoming human, in striving to fully understand others, ourselves, and God.

The process is difficult and filled with awkward discoveries and happy encounters, dreadful sorrow, and unmitigated joy sometimes several at once.

When the portrait was finished, the neighbor did not want to buy the painting, which Kershisnik then sold to the Utah Arts Council in 1994.

The painting shows Mary nursing the baby Jesus, two midwives, Joseph, and a dog with her pups underneath a concourse of angels.

[4] He also explained the iconography of the dog as a representation of fidelity and faithfulness, a common symbol in religious art.

[4] Bren Jackson, an art critic, wrote that the midwives exemplify the "fellowship of sisterhood"[17] and Kershisnik adds that he would imagine that there would have been women there to help Mary.

[20] Viewers interpret the painting in different ways; some see it as depicting divine revelation and others see it as showing family history.

[21] Of the painting, Kershisnik wrote, "My intention for this piece was to speak to the most intensely private and intimate kind of supernatural interference, influence, and assistance...

The couple's ability to be present with Jesus shows that they are righteous, because a wicked person cannot "abide in the presence of the sacred.

[24] Kershisnik's work, Descent From the Cross, is included in this exhibition, which Sean Rossiter criticized for depicting Christ too lightly, and as he argues, limiting the emotional weight of Crucifixion of Jesus.