Been meaning to post about the California artist Jesse Wiedel who paints like a madman. Awesome-ness! My brother and I each own a painting of his (the two shown above from 2007). He has shown in many galleries across the US of A. No, his work actually IS the US of A. Lots of beautiful west coast color/light, frantic dreamlike states of wonder and fright, mythologies mashed up, falling on their ass, cultural wastelands shown for half price. My favorite pieces of his are small, quick, flexible, fairly ill, impossibly conceived. The one I purchased (from Show Cave in LA) was from a series about Kris Kristofferson songs. Jesus was a Capricorn, the first painting, is a very famous song of his. Let me give it a try: Kris and presumably Rita Coolidge have been spending lots of time in shitty hotel rooms out west and things are starting to go wrong... Kris has miraculously transformed into the capricorn-jesus-goat-fish but the wine-milk suckled from god Zeus is instead mother's milk painfully provided through the sins of the sexual-devil-monster-mary Rita who is walking on water. Let us now take nourishment from this scene. Formally I love the spatial composition, feeling loosely over-composed, with a beautiful palette and varietal paint handling, what is not to like here? The other painting we got is from a series involving trailer parks, urban decay, bored/crazed meth heads. What is going here? Perhaps the residents are merely practicing martial arts. We don't know. Maybe we don't want to know.
