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Still life meets wildlife in Jason Wheatley's latest
paintings. The artist mixes impeccable brushwork with Oriental motifs
and Audubon-quality depictions of birds, fish, and flowers. These
lush, fantastic tableaux balance a painstaking rendering of texture
with an electric use of color and confident, painterly gestures.
In Fish Fight (2005), a shallow lacquered
table propped against a battered wall displays items with vaguely
Asian associations—a rooster, chopsticks, a teacup, a slender
metal watering can—rendered in exquisite details, down to
the teacup's delicate blue-and-white pattern and the gleaming surface
of the metal. Wheatley's virtuoso brushwork is particularly evident
in the way he captures the sheen of the table with a brilliant turquoise
stroke.
But just to the right of this fairly standard still-life
arrangement is a quirky addition, a lone red-and-white goldfish
swimming in midair. Wheatley extends this idiosyncratic world even
further in works such as Beach Side Take Over (2005), in
which a monkey rides a greyhound across a dreamy, moonlit beach.
It's tempting to dismiss such fairy-tale subjects as outlandish
kitsch, but the painting is rendered with such careful attention
to detail that its narratives somehow seem compelling.
Likewise, in Big Fish, Little Fish (2005)
a monkey with a paintbrush sports a rakish red beret and perches
atop a rabbit, while more goldfish swim by. It's a kind of humble
self-portrait that captures the balance of romance and irreverence
that perfectly characterizes Wheatley's work.
This review originally appeared
in the December, 2005 issue of ARTnews.
Reprinted with permission.
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