Royce Weatherly | 2012 - 2020

 

Royce Weatherly (b. 1957) is an American painter from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Weatherly received his BA from Wake Forest University (1980), and MFA from the University of Wisconsin/Madison (1984). Over the past three decades, he has developed a profoundly simple, and yet deeply enigmatic painting style that combines his peculiar Vermeer-like still lives with an eerie quietude devoid of narrative symbolism. His painstaking, and laborious process- it may take him up to 5 years to finish a painting- is in sharp contrast to an art world accustomed to quick fixes. In fact, the artist stopped painting altogether for nearly 15 years; from 1998 until 2012, after seeing the ways that the gallery system treated art and artists like an “assembly line”. Although little known in the general art world, Weatherly has a devoted, and growing, following inside the highest circles of art collectors around the world. The artist has received both the prestigious Guggenheim Grant (2015), and the Inga Maren Otto Fellowship at the Watermill Center in Watermill, N.Y. (2017).