I saw Onsen‘s Subaru from the balcony of my apartment, so I ran down the steps and hopped in to the passenger seat.  We were running late to meet with the artist Thea Wolfe, creator of the WEEN coloring book.

A week earlier, I had received a Google instant message from a friend and staff member at Cornish School of the Arts here in Seattle.  He informed me that there were some really great paintings of WEEN posted up at the institution and suggested that I come down and see them.  In all honesty, I was a bit leery about the validity of the work.  I knew that it was probably either going to be amazing or fucking terrible.  For me, it’s hard to find any gray area with that sort of subject matter.  I was sent a couple of iphone photo images and quickly realized that the artist was no joke; the paintings were, in fact, much more than I could have ever expected.

I wanted to help the student get their work to the source and I quickly had delusions of grandeur, in which I became like Maurice Starr when he discovered New Edition and NKOTB.  I’ve been in semi-regular contact with WEEN‘s management since the site began and I knew that, if I forwarded the images of the painter to them, the work of the artist that I was “discovering” would be undeniable.  “What’s her name and contact info?“  I asked my friend.  He went to check and typed back the name “Thea Wolfe“.  I recognized it immediately and knew that she didn’t need any help from me; I already owned a copy of the coloring book that she created for the group last year.  She wasn’t a current student at all, her paintings were posted up on the alumni wall.

After checking out her site, I headed down to see the paintings in person.  They were much more impressive than any still frame camera could represent.  Colorful and full of motion, many of the paintings had reflective iridescent shapes and pentagons within them that shifted depending on the view, lighting, and angle.  I had never seen a simulation of psychedelic experiences portrayed that way through paint, or any that more accurately conveyed them.  The artist statement explained that the series was based on what Wolfe refers to as “The Year of the Wrong“, a period of time in which she traveled thousands of miles to attend a number of performances on WEEN‘s “La Cucaracha” tour with a primary focus of doing what she felt inside, regardless of how unreasonable, ridiculous, or “wrong” it may seem to the outside world.  Based on her work and various statements and views that she’s expressed through interviews, her website, and elsewhere, I knew that there was the strong probability for a good conversation to come from meeting her in person. Read the rest of this entry →