Sometimes the most colorful moments at the Sundance Film Festival happen off screen.

French painter Georges Seurat employed small, distinct dots of paint. Abstract expressionist bad-boy Jackson Pollock deployed the entropy of drip painting. Japanese artist Ushio Shinohara, Neo-Dadaist legend and subject of Sundance documentary "Cutie and the Boxer," scores his artistic knockouts on canvas with a good pair of gloves and all the color of a good fight.

The Tokyo-born artist has lived and worked in the United States since 1969, when a Rockefeller grant brought him to New York City. The 81-year-old Shinohara offered a staged creation of his work Jan. 21 before a rapt, ringside crowd at downtown Salt Lake City’s Central Utah Art Center (175 E. 200 South, Salt Lake City) after a Sundance Film Festival screening of "Cutie and the Boxer" at the Broadway Centre Cinemas. Directed by Zachary Heinzerling, the world-premiere documentary was five years in the making. It explores the give-and-take in the painter’s relationship with Noriko, his wife of 40 years.

Ben Fulton