Aquarium Renaissance - Fred Wessel (NEW)
Aquarium Renaissance, Fred Wessel

Aquarium Renaissance

Artist

Fred Wessel

Nationality

American

Heritage

Italo-American 

Medium

Offset Lithograph

Date

1984

Dimensions

22 1/2 x 30 inches

Edition Size

100 prints in this edition

Printer

Jim "BJ" Hughes

Provenance

Brandywine Workshop and Archives

Location

Philadelphia, PA

About the Work

From the Artist

A two-week trip that I took to Italy in 1984 had a profound and prolonged influence on my work. At that time, I was involved in making 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 firsthand. I could not have predicted the dramatic impact, both direct and indirect, that this journey of discovery 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.

Since the Bauhaus, the term "precious" has had a negative connotation in art schools. It was a term used derisively in the 1960s to describe work that did not adhere to the fashionably pared-down kernels of conceptualism or minimalism.

But after seeing the beauty, sensitivity, harmony—the "preciousness"—of Italian Renaissance painting—especially the early Renaissance work of artists such as Fra Angelico, Duccio, and Simone Martini—I 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 that illuminate the picture’s surface impressed me deeply. It was "preciousness" elevated to grand heights: semiprecious gems such as lapis lazuli, malachite, azurite, etc., were ground up, mixed with egg yolk, and applied as paint pigments, producing dazzling, breathtaking colors! The surface of these colors forms a texture that sparkles and reflects light much like gold does, but in ways that are much more subtle than gold.

I look to the early Renaissance as a source of inspiration that I can use along 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 but forgotten visual stimuli.
—Excerpted from https://www.fredwessel.com/paintings-drawings/drawings/, accessed 6-15-2021

Fred Wessel teaches printmaking and egg tempera painting at the University of Hartford in Connecticut. Aquarium Renaissance, 1984, was created by developing the image on mylar with tusche and Stabilo pencil. The contrast between realistic fish, object drawing, and rendered materials, including the aquarium's gold frame, is striking. Wessel establishes juxtaposition between the skull on the outside of the tank and the fish and vegetation inside. The faint outline of the seahorse and other marine life illustrates the artist in the process of creating. Wessel strives to imbue contemporary objects with ideal beauty, harmony, and visual poetry, drawing inspiration from the Renaissance art of Fra Angelico and Duccio di Buoninsegna. 
—Adapted from "Fresh, Human and Personal: Signature of Brandywine Workshop," Three Decades of American Printmaking: The Brandywine Workshop Collection (Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press, 2004)

About the Artist

Fred Wessel

Fred Wessel was born in New York City. He earned his BFA from Syracuse University, NY; his MFA from University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and studied at Pratt Graphic Art Center, New York City. He is professor emeritus at the Hartford Art Schoo...

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