No. 18 Vol. 5
My Life Publications • 1-800-691-7549
May 2022
Hackettstown Painter, Inspired by New Jersey Scenery, is Both Student and Teacher of Craft
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By Alexander Rivero, Staff Writer arly on in Wes Sherman’s marriage about 30 years ago, his wife, who at the time was working her way through a graduate degree, encouraged him to take his fascination with painting a little more seriously. Sherman, who studied biology and physiology in college and was looking for a change of pace in his professional life, took her advice. He quit his job, took up painting, and committed himself to become a full-time artist. During the next decade, while perfecting and honing in on his own style, Sherman, a Tennessee native, would devour everything he could find on the lives and habits of the great masters of painting. No artist was off his spectrum of curiosity, and reading, which was already a well-etched habit of his daily life, became a rich source of nourishment for his own great aspiration—self-discovery through selfexpression. For Sherman, all painters, however different in style and approach, had at least one trait in common: they each sought to take the formless chaos of reality and distill it onto a canvas as a representable dream uniquely their own. In his studying the lives of the masters, he heard echoes of what his own life might be one day. “I love the history of painting as much as I love the craft side of it,” says Sherman, recalling the early days of discovering his own style. “I read about all the great masters. Manet, Monet. Matisse would sometimes visit my thoughts as well. I’m a big fan of not just the end result but how it all got there, how these people lived and what they cared about, what happened to them.” Among the artists whose work Sherman fell in love with over that ten-year span was the man he would hail as the greatest abstract painter of his generation: Teaneck native
Thomas Nozkowski. Through his lush canvases of color and intricate scale, Nozkowski gave Sherman a vision, as broad as it was deep, with which to interpret the world around him. Nozkowski’s visual language was bold, colorful, unapologetic. It seemed to emanate from corners of the man’s subconscious that were otherwise inaccessible, immune to any rational attempt at dissection. For Sherman, discovering Nozkowski was a sort of triumphant capstone to a long period of exploring his own secret depths. By then he was already well on his way to his own vision. Now, with a master mentor, he was ready for the next phase of his journey. He saw that Nozkowski was working as the chair of painting at Rutgers University, a position he chose over a similar offer from Yale University after retiring from his job as an advertisement editor for Mad Magazine. Sherman wasted no time. He applied to the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts in New Brunswick, was accepted, and moved to the Garden State beaming at the chance to not only meet but to study under one of his heroes. “I’ve certainly had a few mentors over my career,” says Sherman, “but [Nozkowski] really helped me learn how to see every day, every moment. He showed me how to be fully aware at all times of everything around me. To never skip a thing or to be lazy in my observation of things.” Out of the qualities Sherman added to his artistic repertoire while earning his MFA at Rutgers, the courage to take a leap ranks amongst the most important. It was a trait that served him well in 2008, during what he calls a “crisis of faith” in his own trajectory, where he questioned whether it was truly necessary for anyone in his generation,
including himself, to be making abstract paintings. “It just seemed like a cooked idea, very 20th century,” he says. “I knew that, if I kept going down this path, I’d always be standing in the shadows of greats. I also knew that, if I wanted, I could push myself away from pure abstraction and start playing around with ideas of my own.” From here on, Sherman began boldly incorporating more horizon lines into his work, having internal conversations with himself as he worked regarding whether the painting would be about the sky or the ground, questioning the structure of his work, and whether he could build other, more complex paradigms on them. continued on page 4