Selected Monochromatic Paintings and Works on Paper, Part Two of Two

Over his thirty-year career Wedman has moved fluidly between painting and drawing without preferencing one practice over the other. He has rendered drawings on the monumental scale of history painting as in The Brides, an eight foot by eight foot drawing on canvas, while the monochromatic greys of his recent paintings mimic the tonality of drawing. The new paintings, watercolours and drawings on exhibition at the Charles H. Scott Gallery are a continuation of Wedman’s grey monochromatic series, which he began in 2007. Like earlier work in the series they depict images of spectacle, including flying saucers and underwater volcanoes, although Wedman denies the potential for extravagance these kinds of images inherently contain by obfuscating the image and emptying them of colour.

For Wedman, rendering the work in grey tones “draws your attention away from subject matter and turns it to a consideration of a flat picture plane, and the consideration of subjecthood and why the subject is interesting. It transforms the subject, sometimes in ways that are unexpected.” An example of this is a series of twelve watercolours of newspaper pages where the content is made indistinguishable with only the familiar structural form remaining recognizable. They play with notions of the familiar, and he as he puts it, “you take something from one place and open up its potential meaning. It’s not really anything remarkable.”