Shanon has set up a small "painting studio" for Wesley. Here's what the NY Times had to say about his most recent exhibit:
"Are these Wesley’s diversions, his inspirations, or his necessities? Where star artists like Jason Rhoades or David Ellis recreate their studios as the scene of an all-night binge, Wesley’s seems truer to life. In a career, as in art, the scraps of the everyday are hard to keep together.
On inspection, even the abstraction dissolves into a found object. The white or off-white ground looks found and rumpled, as if poorly stretched. The slim color stripes look like elastic bands holding the painting together. Is this what Mondrian meant by Neoplasticism—a new plastic art (or maybe latex)? Yet this, too, proves an illusion. Wesley has painted everything in brilliantly and deceptively simple pre-school-esque materials.
As the tour de force suggests, he is not above boasting. He is also claiming some distinctly American ancestors, only starting with Thoreau. His trompe l'oeil, like the straps of an old-fashioned letter rack, owes a debt to such nineteenth-century models as J. F. Peto. More recent painting not in the show abandons Mondrian's stripes entirely, much as he in turn disdained illusion. Wesley retains, however, his fictional collage of paints, Triscuits and cereal bars."
Whatever.
