Wes Hempel

Last Basket

2022

A walk through any major museum will reveal paintings that depict or legitimate only certain kinds of experience. Despite the good intentions of critical theorists questioning the validity of the canon, paintings of the old masters on the walls of museums like the Met, the Louvre, Rijks museum still have a certain cache. They're revered not just for their technique but because they enshrine our collective past experience. Of course, it's a selected past that gets validated. Conspicuously absent to me as a gay man...

A walk through any major museum will reveal paintings that depict or legitimate only certain kinds of experience. Despite the good intentions of critical theorists questioning the va...

A walk through any major museum will reveal paintings that depict or legitimate only certain kinds of experience. Despite the good intentions of critical theorists questioning the va...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --A walk through any major museum will reveal paintings that depict or legitimate only certain kinds of experience. Despite the good in...

Heather Neill's (US based) "Tied Up" is an original, handmade oil painting that depicts a wood paneled rustic fishing boat with all its gear and fittings...

Signed (at lower right): L; (on verso): D. Ligare / 2024

Signed (at lower right): L; (on verso): David Ligare

Heather Neill's (US based) "Last of the Season" is an original, handmade oil painting that depicts a suspended tomato with the hand of a gardener with glove. A yellow bird is hovering nearby. Artist Autobiography: Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, 1958, my family moved every two years thereafter from California to NJ to PA, and back and forth in-between coming to rest for a while in Swarthmore, PA for the high school years then off to Connecticut College as an art major. The only formal training I have is from my college years, when I focused mainly on black and white, finding refuge in the pencil and printmaking process. I went to Boston after college. Worked in the Harvard Sq. Coop as a picture framer and ended up managing their custom-framing department for most of the 80’s. I left there to move to Muddy Creek Forks, a tiny self-contained village in a remote holler of Pennsylvania where I lived in the abandoned general store (post office, train station and hotel all in one building) and spent the next 5 or 6 years as a traditional chairmaker. Sitting on my shaving horse with my drawknife (using only hand tools) I made Shaker style ladder-back chairs and made the rounds of juried craft shows and museums. I can’t count the number of odd jobs that have put bread on the table since then, but they include farm hand, carpenter, bookbinder, vest maker, stripper at a three woman printing company and picture framer off and on for 25 years. My easel has been set up in every one of the 26 places I have lived so far. As of 2001 I now paint full time and divide my time between my log cabin and adjoining studio along the Little Conewago Creek in Manchester, PA and the open studio of Martha’s Vineyard, MA. By the time I decided to give painting my full time efforts I was well into my early forties. My partner of twenty years is a hospice nurse and living with her has taught me that life is short...