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Wes Christensen, "Figurative Painting," Artweek,
June 1996
The "issues"
surrounding figure painting, and representational art in general, are
created by people who don't do it. My main concern is to communicate
clearly to anyone who wants to look, and to invite viewers to interact
with the imagery, to engage in a sort of imaginative conversation. The
illusionist technique needed to create this fictive environment is
important, but it can not be a distraction if I hope to succeed. In
the English tradition of the "conversation piece," I try to make
illustrations for stories not yet written.
The novelist Rachel Ingalls has a character say,
"What he really wanted was a book that played to him like a tune." She
must have had someone like me in mind, since my goal is similar: to paint
the visual equivalent of the song you can't get out of your head-pictures
that walk out of the gallery with you when you leave. The best
representational artwork relies on the viewer whose response completes
them. This engagement is filled with the resonant loose ends that make
paint poetic. The best of these images remain in the mind's eye and
reassert themselves of their own volition, which is the most lingering
feature of fine figurative painting:
That silent afterimage that choreographs
our dreams,
By attaching faces and bodies onto our thoughts,
Making them simple, concrete and timeless.
-- Wes Christensen
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ArtOnPaper Magazine
July/August 2005
Wes Christensen
Koplin Del Rio, West Hollywood. Going back and forth between a gently
claustrophobic
realism (people seen from a high vantage, cornered in interiors) and a
double-take-
inducing surrealism (performances of either inexplicable rituals or simple
tasks
done in slightly odd ways), Christensen drives home a sense of pervading
unease
with a masterful miniaturism. His watercolor pencil pictures combine the
hyper-precision
found in Northern Renaissance tempera painting with a diffuse light,
making the
images at once tactile and incandescent.
-- Peter Frank
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Los Angeles Times
Thursday, July 4, 1991
Recalling Illuminated Manuscripts:
It's probably not a coincidence that the tight realism of Wes
Christensen's enigmatic watercolor and gouache drawings at Space
Gallery suggest drawings in illuminated manuscripts or elaborately
drawn bookplates. He makes images that play games with literature and
personal narrative. But if the stories remain hidden or must be puzzled
out, it is the glowing color of the small, jewel-like images that is
enticing enough to reward the effort. Layer upon layer of built-up
color gives the drawings' surface a delectable, oscillating energy.
Christensen's brand of literate storytelling probably owes as much to
Renaissance art history as to the magic of children's book
illustrations. There is as much Hans Holbein as Maurice Sendak to some
of these images. Like Jon Swihart's egg tempera paintings of
quasi-religious parables, Christensen uses thoroughly contemporary
scenes endowed with a sense of mysterious import. But the artist's
scenes, springing undoubtedly from an autobiographical source , are
often thoroughly mundane and only nip off into philosophy at the last
second. In "Reveille in Little Sparta," a man weeds a thick patch of
garden. Only the inscription on a nearby pillar - "Life is short. The
Tomb is fleeting" - spins the scene into a larger meaning.
Christensen's meanings, however, are often impossible to decipher -
unless you brush up on your French or look up biblical references.
Words and text are key to ferreting out implications. -- Suvan Geer
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