Wesley Swanson

My paintings begin where things fall apart—on worn surfaces, in the slow erosion of time. I’m drawn to what’s been weathered, layered, and broken down. Like old graffiti walls, each mark carries history, memory, and the trace of someone who came b...

My paintings begin where things fall apart—on worn surfaces, in the slow erosion of time. I’m drawn to what’s been weathered, layered, and broken down. Like old graffiti walls, each mark carries history, memory, and the trace of someone who came before. I work in mixed media, using bold colors, intuitive gestures, and a process of adding and removing—scraping, sanding, cutting—to uncover what’s buried beneath. Many of my paintings include small windows in the canvas: quiet openings that suggest there’s more to be seen, more beneath the surface. Color in my work is emotional. I use contrast—warm against cool, dense against airy—to mirror the shifts we feel inside ourselves. Lately, I’ve been imagining how these works could evolve into environments you can move through, where emotion becomes physical space. At its core, my work is about holding space for what’s often unseen: vulnerability, memory, and the quiet weight of being human.