BIO:

Jesse Wiedel was raised outside of the parched, unassuming northern California town of Redding.  After a youth spent observing the distinctive and idiosyncratic cultural dimensions of inland rural California, he eventually migrated to the city to receive his degree in painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. For more than thirty years he’s been making art in Humboldt County, California—where he finds yet more fertile ground for his interest in human folly and frailties.

Jesse’s work has been exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally, including shows in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Joshua Tree, Portland, Brooklyn, London, Berlin, Milan and Zurich.  

His paintings can be read as satire, social criticism, psychedelic excursions, or simply joyful celebrations of freedom. He works primarily in oil paint in a style that is both illusionistic and painterly. His work is also inspired by many movements in art history, including Ash Can, New Objectivity, Genre Painting, and Abstract Expressionism. Classical religious imagery is sometimes mixed in with scenarios of daily life to blend the cosmic with the ordinary.

For many decades, Jesse has performed in garage/punk bands, a practice that also deeply informs his visual art.

Contact Jesse:

email: jessewiedel@suddenlink.net

THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS:

"Norman Rockwell is in the spin cycle stumbling out of a dive bar mumbling to hisself "What happened to America?" after seeing Jesse Wiedel's world."

-Carl Baldwin, Velveteria Museum

"His art is wack-tastic"

-Nicole Eisenman

"These are the people I work with every day."

-Eureka police officer

"Wiedel really captures the sense of the psychedelic in everyday life as well as the decay of the American Dream."

-Ann Magnuson

"His paintings are a cross between Van Gogh, Bruegel and Mike Judge."

-Robyn O'Neil

"Faithfully recording the bottom of the drug culture, his paintings feel as if his consciousness has merged with and taken on the hallucinations of the denizens he's surrounded by."

-Georganne Deen

"Wiedel's oeuvre celebrates a wonderfully weird naive assortment of trailer trash, methamphetamine addicts, lot lizards, country music hacks, red necks, outlaw bikers, Vikings, mythical Graboids and Russian oligarchs as subject for his colorful but somewhat brutal paintings."

-Kim Stringfellow