Jesse Wiedel: Stalking the Good Life
The paintings in Stalking the Good Life are all about foraging for the elusive butterfly of freedom. Depicted are humans “getting away from it all” in remote, decayed and abandoned areas: empty parking lots, sun-bleached motels, recreational spaces gone to seed. These are disjointed versions of a beach resort vacation getaway, places where the promise of leisure has long since departed but the yearning for escape remains.
The figures are shown celebrating with reckless abandon, in love with life. Some are simply passing time, communing with a special landscape. Others are grieving their excessive decisions. These paintings all take place in the gleaming light of day, under a free-flowing, candy-coated sky that sets the stage for an intoxicated dreamscape of the good life.
Wiedel combines commonplace and occasionally bleak landscapes with vividly rendered images inspired by biker parties, illustrated religious tracts, counter-cultural rituals, and celebratory scenes from everyday life. His paintings can be read as satire, social criticism, psychedelic excursions, or simply joyful celebrations of freedom. He works in a style that is both illusionistic and painterly, aiming to elicit an uneasy sensation that our own reality is not too dissimilar from these disturbing fictional worlds.
Jesse Wiedel (b. 1965) lives and works in Eureka, California. He received his BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute. Raised near Redding in inland northern California, Wiedel has spent more than thirty years making art in Humboldt County, where he finds fertile ground for his interest in human folly and frailties.
Wiedel has exhibited extensively throughout his career, with solo exhibitions at Morris Graves Museum of Art (2025, 2004), and venues in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, and Portland. His work has been included in group exhibitions internationally, including shows in London, Berlin, Zurich, and Milan. Working primarily in oil paint in a style that is both observational and painterly, Wiedel’s paintings can be read as social criticism, satire, and joyful celebrations of freedom. His work has been featured in publications including Turps Banana (UK), Beautiful Decay, and Artbound, and has earned praise from artists including Nicole Eisenman and Robyn O’Neil, as well as cultural figures such as Ann Magnuson and writer Kim Stringfellow, who have recognized his ability to capture both the decay of the American Dream and the psychedelic quality of everyday life. Wiedel lives and works in Eureka with his wife who is also an artist. They have a pet tortoise.