Wessman and Wiesner: Serious Play with Paint

I had the pleasure of meeting Robin Wessman at a local art show. The Provincetown Independent featured Wessman’s paintings in “Robin Wessman’s Destabilizing Reality” (March 20, 2025). In this article we see Wessman’s color and light leap off the page. Reporter Abraham Storer describes these still life images as “rendered realistically, with fastidious care given to their shape, color, and surface qualities.” And there’s magic. Objects float: fruits, vegetables, and books we expect to rest with respect upon tablecloths do not. I love how Wessman works hard at playing with oil paint.

My only exposure to this kind of joy is with the Caldecott winner David Wiesner’s picture books. His watercolors are precisely realistic yet surprising. In The Three Pigs, beloved story book characters literally leave the confines of their pages. In Tuesday, frogs fly from their marsh on lily pads and travel through a nearby town. Vegetables take flight in June 29, 1999. In David Wiesner & The Art of Wordless Storytelling, Wiesner talks about Free Fall. “I didn’t write a story first and then conceive images for it. The story had grown out of a visual idea, I wrote the story with pictures, and the finished book had no text. The writing process and visualization process were one and the same–I couldn’t separate the two.”

The comparison isn’t perfect, but in my limited knowledge of fun fine art, the works of these two masters brighten my day.