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JOEL SHEESLEY:
Evidence on the Pavement
Dream on Edge, 2008, Oil on canvas
NOVEMBER 15 to DECEMBER 15, 2013
Robert T. Wright Community Gallery of Art College of Lake County
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Messenger, 2008, Oil on canvas
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Journal entry 11-17-13 (Contemporary Art History class) Regarding paintings by Joel Sheesley
I was a little late, and when I came in the lecture hall it was dark, and the visiting speaker, Professor Hadlock, was talking about two images that were projected on the screen. I was kind of confused because neither image looked like the work in the gallery. On the left was an abstract painting (the speaker said it reminded her of Helen Frankenthaler’s work) and the painting on the right was a “15th century painting of the Annunciation by Fra Angelico.” Professor Hadlock said the Annunciation is a story about an angel making an announcement to Mary, the mother of Jesus. She noted that the abstract painting on the left was by Joel Sheesley just a couple of years after graduate school days and that it somehow referred to the Fra Angelico painting. It wasn’t clear what the reference was, but looking at the screen I kind of felt like the Fra Angelico painting was talking to Sheesley’s painting like the angel talking to Mary; or maybe the other way around.
The speaker said that she first met Joel Sheesley back in the ‘80s when he was giving a talk on “Sandinista public art,” which he had studied while on a sabbatical. I’m not sure what “Sandinista” was but the images she showed looked like some sort of political graffiti. She said she was surprised when she saw the paintings he was doing at that time, and so was I when she showed slides. The paintings were of suburban scenes with odd juxtapositions like one with a construction worker holding a stop sign where the S is made with the silhouette of a snake, while a baseball game is taking place in the background. Professor Hadlock said that looking at the paintings with knowledge of Sheesley’s interest in Sandinista public art made her sense a kind of political urgency in his work. She went on to show other paintings to give us an idea of his subsequent development: More paintings set in suburbia, but chronicling some sort of “metaphoric journey.” Paintings set in suburban interiors. “Paintings playing with ideas about painting.” And then she finished saying: “So, that’s a little about Sheesley’s work up ‘til now. Let’s go see the latest chapter.” And we all walked over to the gallery.
Tim Lowly is a Chicago-based artist. He is affiliated with North Park University as professor, artist-in-residence and gallery director. Sometimes he adopts a fictional persona as a way of saying “Hmm, I wonder…”
It was hard to look at the paintings with so many people in the gallery, so I checked out the guest book. Some of the comments were pretty goofy. A couple stuck with me: “Puddles, puddles, puddles. This guy’s got a puddle complex.” And “I want to study stage design too!” Then I found a piece of folded paper in the back of the book.
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On it was this poem.
Surface Change by Kelly Vanderbrug Appraise what’s made. Tight glints on dark darks and a world of middle tones. mapping implied gravel. Fussy No real roughness. Joel drags the painting to the drive, flops it directly on asphalt. Skin so tenderly rendered meets sharp bits. The leftover snow hard and dirty digs claws at edges and shadows of gray grass. Damp chill air waits. Cirrus clouds of March say rain. No matter. Sanding takes seconds. Lean into it. The image surfaces less labored. Hours of dab and stroke gone to this X-ray glow. Strange.
Neither Height Nor Depth, 2009, Oil on canvas 2
Kelly Vanderbrug is an artist and North Park University professor.
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We Were Still Far Off, 2010, Oil on canvas
I don’t know how to read poetry, but reading this did make me look at the paintings a little differently. But when I looked at the paintings, the first thing I thought about was the puddles. Like that guest book comment said, there are lots of puddles in these paintings. But then I noticed that while all of the paintings have puddles, they all have just two puddles, and further, it’s the same two puddles in every painting. Kelly Vanderbrug says that Joel “… drags the painting to the drive…” which made me think: These aren’t just any two puddles; these puddles are in Joel Sheesley’s driveway. He encounters them when he goes out into the world from his house. Suddenly something made sense in relation to what Professor Hadlock had noted at one point in her talk. She said that while Joel Sheesley’s work has a kind of objective distance, the subject matter is usually in some way personal. From the suburban settings based on where he lived to friends and family serving as models to his home being the setting for the domestic paintings. Perhaps these puddles are evidence of Sheesley’s connection to the painting despite an apparently anonymous (what could be more anonymous
than asphalt) setting. I suppose that one could even see the two puddles as echoing the vision of the artist’s two eyes. Or the angel talking to Mary: I keep going back to that Fra Angelico painting. One thing that had struck me about that painting is how it looked like a stage set. And with that comment in the guest book about stage design I started thinking about these paintings as stage sets. One of the paintings even looks a little like that Annunciation: the one with the man and woman holding a string with a little canoe suspended between them. The two look like they are doing some sort of performance and we are the audience. All of the paintings more or less have this theater-like quality. It might have something to do with how flat the paintings look. Why do they look so flat? Does it have to do with Professor Hadlock’s comment about “the influence of Abstract Expressionism on artists of Joel Sheesley’s generation?” If I understand correctly most painting prior to “Ab Ex” (her words) involved the creation of a believable space in which Continued on page 4
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Dream at a Crossroads, 2008, Oil on canvas
Continued from page 3
the subjects of the painting were placed. With Ab Ex the surface of the painting was both the ground and the subject. She quoted the well-known Ab Ex painter Jackson Pollack as saying “I don’t paint nature, I am nature.” That, she said, suggests that his paintings – which were a record of his movement, dripping paint – are a kind of “existential self-portraiture.” Now when I look at Joel Sheesley’s paintings I see a kind of echo to Pollock that helps explain why they look so flat and why they are peculiarly personal feeling. In sanding the surface of the paintings on his driveway Sheesley adopts an action that is, in relation to gravity and effect, somewhat similar to Pollock’s: the result of the action is a flattened surface that gives presence to the action and the person who made that action. But now that charged surface is host to a theater of mysteries. Oh, I could go on and on about that, but perhaps this is enough for now.
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Noah, 2012, Oil on canvas
Sounding, 2009, Oil on canvas 5
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Sparrows, 2012, Oil on canvas
Hold on to Your Dream, 2008, Oil on canvas 6
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JOEL SHEESLEY Artist’s Statement
I share the sentiment of Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” which speaks about “walking wary” of the chance discovery of content or meaning in everyday life. “…With luck, Trekking stubborn through this season Of fatigue, I shall Patch together a content Of sorts, …” To me, the patching together of content suggests an arrival at a turning point; a point at which our pervasive tendency toward oblivion is dispelled by an awareness that the status quo, oblivion’s usual way of manifesting itself, is illusory. At this turning point one senses that everything is important. It is important for what it reveals about everything else. We find ourselves in an indeterminate network of relationships that keeps opening up before us. But here our energies and intellectual powers are taxed. How much of that indeterminacy can one absorb? How soon do we, in exhaustion, begin trading upon trivialities, banal coincidences? The world offers an endless supply of facts. We are pressured to understand how they are important to us. Which facts relate in ways that bring us insight? Which coincidental meetings are actually important? It is under the pressure to know these things that we feel the whole world groaning. Art is one such sometimes-exquisite groan. In whatever manner or voice, art calls out the relations between things, even subdividing the “thing itself ” into its own sets of relationships. Painting is one avenue in a network of roads that comprise what Art is. To be professional about painting is to know its history and technical detail, to be enmeshed in its limits; to “walk wary” with it in the world, alert to its capacities for patching together a content of sorts.
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Exhibit Checklist
JOEL SHEESLEY: Evidence on the Pavement
Biography
1. Sparrows, 2012, Oil on canvas, 26" x 80"
Joel Sheesley is a painter who lives in the suburbs of Chicago. He graduated with a B.F.A. in painting and drawing from Syracuse University School of Art, and from the University of Denver School of Art, with an M.F.A. in painting and printmaking. He teaches art at Wheaton College. His work has been exhibited regularly in Chicago, including at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2010, and in other cities across the country. Mr. Sheesley received an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in 2002. In 2008 Mr. Sheesley’s painting was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso University.
2. Noah, 2012, Oil on canvas, 32" x 80" 3. Airborne, 2011, Oil on canvas, 44" x 79"” 4. The Hunter - Earth’s Crammed with Heaven, 2011, Oil on canvas, 29" x 80" 5. If I Rise on the Wings of Dawn, 2011, Oil on canvas, 26" x 80" 6. Sounding, 2009, Oil on canvas, 24" x 80" 7. We Were Still Far Off, 2010, Oil on canvas, 24" x 80" 8. Nothing Is Lost, 2011, Oil on canvas, 48" x 48" 9. Dream at a Crossroads, 2008, Oil on canvas, 30" x 81" 10. Dream on Edge, 2008, Oil on canvas, 58" x 72" 11. Neither Height Nor Depth, 2009, Oil on canvas, 80" x 36" 12. Messenger, 2008, Oil on canvas, 48" x 48" 13. Hold on to Your Dream, 2008, Oil on canvas, 35" x 81" 14. Portage, 2011, Oil on canvas, 56" x 70" 15. Folded Dream, 2013, Oil on canvas, 60" x 45"
The Hunter - Earth’s Crammed with Heaven, 2011, Oil on canvas 8
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Portage, 2011, Oil on canvas
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JOEL SHEESLEY:
Evidence on the Pavement NOVEMBER 15 to DECEMBER 15, 2013 Robert T. Wright Community Gallery of Art
Gallery Hours: Monday-Thursday, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Sunday, 1-5 p.m. Closed: November 27 to December 1
Information: 847.543.2240 Email: sjones@clcillinois.edu Web page: http://gallery.clcillinois.edu The Robert T. Wright Gallery is a project of the CLC Foundation.
Folded Dream, 2013, Oil on canvas
19351 W. Washington Street, Grayslake, IL 60030
The Robert T. Wright Community Gallery of Art is a project of the College of Lake County Foundation.