My work has always focused on the mystery to be found in the commonplace, everyday world. Working as both a print maker and painter, my subject matter has included construction workers, urban landscapes, horse racing, ants and monkeys interacting as workers and bosses, and abstraction based on the natural world. I have worked with a variety of mediums: hand printed, multi-colored woodcuts; abstract constructions; drawings on paper; oil and acrylic paintings.

In 2011, I started painting vignettes from my house and yard in Chicago. The materials in these domestic scenes include thrift store, estate sale, and outsider art, found objects, and my own work. These pieces encapsulate the random coming together of the unknown, causing the viewer to question and delight in the unexpected. My newer work focuses on local storefronts, both shuttered and currently in business, along with doorways and construction dumpsters. In 2020 I started a series of self-portraits that morphed into using sculpted mannequin heads as models, and the latest series uses shop window figures. These mundane subjects take on a mysterious life of their own for me, enveloping a sense of time and place that never remains still.

BRIAN WELLS