Fred Wessel is represented by:

Artist's Statement:
In  1984 a two week trip to Italy had a profound and prolonged influence on my work.  At that time I was involved with a series of Aquarium images.  I went to Italy to view the art of the Renaissance, for it is my belief that all visual artists, especially realists, should experience and study this work first hand.  I could not have predicted the dramatic impact, both directly and indirectly, that this travel would have on my ensuing work.I believe that in our search for novelty in post-modernist art making, we may have lost touch with certain basics; beauty, grace, harmony and visual poetry are rarely considered important criteria for evaluating contemporary works of art.

 Since the Bauhaus, the term, 'precious', has had a negative connotation in art schools.  It is a term that was used derisively in the '60s to describe work that moved away from the fashionably pared down kernels of conceptualism or minimalism. Witnessing  the beauty, sensitivity, harmony and preciousness of Italian Renaissance painting (especially the early Renaissance work of artists such as Fra Angelico, Duccio and Simone Martini) made me realize that, as artists, we may have abandoned too much.  The ever-changing inner light that radiates from gold leaf used judiciously on the surface of a painting and the use of pockets of rich, intense colors which also help illuminate the picture's surface impressed me deeply.  Preciousness was elevated to grand heights; semi-precious gems such as lapis lazuli, malachite, azurite, etc. were ground up, mixed with egg yolks and applied as paint pigments, producing dazzling and breathtaking colors!  The surface of these colors forms a texture that sparkles and reflects light much like gold does, but in much more subtle ways.

I look to the early Renaissance as a source of inspiration to be used with contemporary content and image making.  I look to the Renaissance as the artists of that time looked back to early Greek and Roman art; not as a reactionary but as one who rediscovers and reapplies important, forgotten visual stimuli.

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