START JOURNAL, ISSUE TWO, OCTOBER 2024

ABSTRACT REALITIES

WESLEY EBERLE ON THE ART OF COMMUNICATION

An interview with John-Paul Pryor 

Originally hailing from the rural American Midwest, Wesley Eberle is a self-trained artist who draws on his extensive travels for inspiration. He is based between his studios in London and the Greek island of Hydra, and his abstract expressionist work seeks to explore the hidden - presenting canvases that seem to be in a state of transformation.

What first drew you to the path of the artist as a child?

I was raised in a home where art was a constant. Music was always on, shelves overflowed with books, walls were full of paintings. But I didn’t paint as a child. I grew up in a small Midwestern town. My father moonlighted as a jazz deejay, and my mother would trundle me off to Chicago art museums whenever she could. But my first love was music and songwriting. Academic life took me to physics. Professional life began in politics and continued for 20 years in political and strategic communications. Painting came more recently. And I found quickly that I could draw on everything I loved – the physics and balance of abstract painting, the human cognitive exploration of figurative work, and the ability to tell a story of a moment – a single moment, a feeling, a love, a heartbreak – better in painting than I could in song.

What essentially are you seeking to explore and transmit?

I came to painting later in life after a long career in political and strategic communications. And my background influences my work through my interest in our rapidly changing culture of communication and how individuals and groups perceive themselves and the world around them. I am not seeking to transmit a particular end but rather to invite feeling and open questions. My work is rooted in communication and perception. I’m interested in memory, expectation and how we view our past, current and future selves. I am particularly drawn to the multiplicities of the self, how we perform them, and how that changes our perception of ourselves, of others, and of memories and time. We live in a society that encourages us more than ever before to perfect the self, and media has developed alongside digital platforms in which we perform doppelganger versions of ourselves. What happens when we confront our doppelgangers? And how does this phenomenon affect mental health? As we normalise modern concepts of therapy, have we supplanted true self-reflection and enlightenment with virtue-signalling as prologue to the performative versions of ourselves?

Isolated units of consumption…

It has now become both affordable and accessible to create “product” versions of ourselves, and as a society we have not truly explored what this means. A brand is, by definition, non-human. To be effective, it must be simple and static – the antithesis of the values of human development. And when this new culture of communications becomes transactional, human interaction becomes zero-sum. When the self takes up too much space, it prevents us from reaching out to one another. We are encouraged to channel our insecurities inward instead of through a community. And, in a society where impending challenges require collective effort, we avoid action and progress. Most alarmingly, we regress.

What fascinates you about abstraction as a mode of expression?  

Abstraction is what creates room for emotion, interpretation and a unique personal connection with the work. Abstraction can also tap into our own tendency to reverse what we perceive as filled and what is void. It is not about reduction, but addition – of emotion, drama, love, pain, anger. Abstraction of the human form elevates the figure, rather than detracting from it, leaving the audience to consider the emotions involved. I want to create a wall of colour. Not a barrier, but one that invites you in, that moves towards you. One that is sculptural, enticing you to explore, to feel it. I want the paint to be the subject, creating movement and emotive force. And when the paint is the subject, one has to expect a lot from it. It needs to interact with itself – colours competing with one another for primacy. 

How do you think the advent of AI in art is going to change the human experience of art? 

In the rearview mirror, very little. Just as modernity hasn’t drastically changed our human relationship with literature or music. Silicon Valley is great at overpromising and underdelivering. And what we’re told will be lifechanging ends up making it easier to pay for a taxi at best and profiteering on our most base instincts at worst. In a digital future that is unclear, one that both advances and degrades our culture, it is the art that exists outside the digital realm, challenging these conceptions of progress, that is most powerful.

What for you is ultimately the purpose of art?

The ultimate purpose of any art is to bring something of permanence into the world that leaves it a better place. It could make us think, question, feel, or simply bring joy. But also, it does not need to. If any art form adds some kind of dimensionality to our world, then it is serving its true purpose.