Egg Tempera Painter-Fred Wessel-at Evansville Museum

Thursday, 22 June 2006 12:45

Evansville, IN - Fred Wessel has been selected as the Evansville Museum’s 2006 Martha and Merritt deJong Foundation Artist-in-Residence.  In conjunction with his residency and week-long classes, forty-two of Wessel’s works will be featured in Main Gallery exhibition until 30 July.

The exhibition is presented in partnership with the MARTHA AND MERRITT DEJONG FOUNDATION and is organized in cooperation with the Arden Gallery in Boston.  Fred Wessel paints using egg tempera, a medium dating back to the Renaissance that was essentially supplanted by oil painting in the 15^th century until its revival in the United States in the 1930s.  A member of the Society of Egg Tempera Painters, Wessel is an authority on the medium and its history.  He is widely recognized for his efforts to revitalize this traditional painting process that is characterized by a brilliant, luminous crispness.  Wessel, a Professor at the Hartford School of Art, University of Hartford, has a remarkable mastery of this challenging painting technique.

Working in portraiture and still life, Wessel brings his subject matter to life using meticulous ink underdrawings and layers of cross-hatched and glazed colors, embellished with tooling, precious jewels and gold leaf.  Wessel looks to the early Renaissance as a source of inspiration that he can use along with contemporary content and image making.

He writes, “It is my belief that all visual artists, especially realists, should experience and study Renaissance work firsthand.  I could not have predicted the dramatic impact, both direct and indirect, that my initial journey to Italy in 1984 would have on my ensuing work.  I believe that in our search for novelty in post-modernist art making, we often lose touch with certain basics: beauty, grace, harmony and visual poetry are nowadays rarely considered important criteria in evaluating contemporary works of art.  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 but forgotten visual stimuli.”

Wessel’s work is included in numerous private collections and in over 45 public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress.  He is represented by the Arden Gallery in Boston and Sherry French Gallery in New York City.

Visit The Evansville Museum at : http://www.emuseum.org/