- Aug. 15, 2024, 11:00 am US/Central
Earth and Sky: Celebrating the Local Landscape
Paintings by Joel Sheesley
On display September 10, 2024 – January 8, 2025
Biography
Joel Scheesley is a painter whose fifty-year artistic path has embraced a variety of genres. About ten years ago he turned toward landscape painting and has been captivated by it ever since. Sheesley is professor emeritus at Wheaton College where he taught painting for forty-two years. He has exhibited his work locally and nationally in galleries and museums. He recently completed artistic residencies with The Conservation Foundation, the Edith Farnsworth House, The Forest Preserve District of DuPage, and the Shirley Heinze Land Trust.
Artist Statement
From the beginning, Fermilab has studied, cared for, and celebrated the ecology of its campus. This exhibition heralds this landscape.
Landscape painting assumes a sympathetic relation between land and the hand of the artist, and so introduces a personal connection to the charisma of the landscape. All my work begins on site, or en plein air, with a two-and-a-half to three-hour painting session. That real time and space encounter with nature is followed by longer hours, working in my studio, where I develop the painting to further degrees of “finish.” During all that time the painting is, like the landscape itself, constantly changing, developing, becoming.
What you have in the gallery, like the seeming immutable earth’s crust, is an appearance of completion. Nothing has actually been captured; the painting surface invites you back to the land that inspired it.
