Playing around with paint and brushes given to him by his partner, artist Jack Balas, launched his career. This writer-turned-artist's first gallery show sold out. Understandably so.
By Christopher Harrity
Farmboy Idyll
Joining the mythic allusions and technical fluency of classical art together with the ideas of personal narrative and social content of postmodern art, Hempel’s paintings explore the divide between the ancient and modern, reason and passion, august ideals and the profoundly individual. The artist recasts modern male figures in historical and culturally iconographic settings, provoking both a rethinking of assumed narratives and mythic themes and inviting a similar reconsideration of contemporary life, masculinity, and sexual norms. Hempel’s societal investigations are rendered in sensuously modeled flesh tones, gleaming marble surfaces, and the immersive depth of Arcadian landscapes — proving as visually seductive as they are conceptually rigorous.
Hempel’s art has been the subject of more than 80 solo and group exhibitions and is included in a growing number of esteemed private and corporate collections, including the Denver Art Museum, the Columbus Museum, the Arnot Art Museum, Microsoft Corp., the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, and the New Britain Museum of American Art.
The Advocate: Why are you an artist?
Wes Hempel: I always wanted to be a writer, but in graduate school, I began playing around with some old brushes and paints that my partner, Jack Balas, had given me. I was mesmerized. I completed my degree in creative writing and began teaching at the University of Colorado in Boulder, but I had fallen in love with art. Jack showed some of my early pieces to his gallery in Denver, Robischon. They gave me a show, which sold out. I’ve been painting ever since.
What catches your eye?
There is something specific I’m always looking for, though it’s hard to put into words — the visual equivalent of a deftly turned phrase or the unexpected image in poetry. In painting an emotional quality can arise from the interplay of composition, color, and value, regardless of subject matter.
Tell us about your process or techniques.
It’s a very traditional technique. These days I do a full-color underpainting in oils — sometimes with the help of an assistant — on gessoed canvas, then apply one or more top coats, making adjustments to form and to heighten the richness of hue and quality of light. I also use glazes to add surface depth and to complicate the coloration. I have a few tricks I’ve developed along the way — I suppose most painters have these — that I hold close to my chest.
How do you choose your subjects?
One of my ongoing projects is a reenvisioning of what art history might have looked like had homosexuality not been vilified in the culture. The paintings one sees in museums are revered in part because they enshrine our collective experience. But it’s a selective past that gets validated. By presenting contemporary males as objects of desire in borrowed art historical settings, I’m able to imagine — and allow viewers to imagine — a history that includes rather than excludes gay experience — and thereby ride the coattails, as it were, of art history’s imprimatur.
What artists do you take inspiration from and why?
This changes all the time for me. When Jack and I first moved to Boulder, I took a year off from working and went systematically through the art library at CU, taking down each book and carefully going through it. It took me the entire year to work my way through the shelves. I used to joke that my faulty knowledge of art history is the result of the books that were checked out.
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