ABOUT JOHN WELLS
John Wells could be called an outsider artist, but one comfortably at home in the many cultural worlds of New York City. His artwork articulates a personal iconography drawn from the natural world, religious texts, abstract exploration, popular culture, and personal whimsy. Analogous to Wells' approach is that of a monk in a medieval scriptorium, copying sacred texts while inserting here and there the vagaries of his own thoughts and imagination.
Following an education at Storm King and Carnegie Mellon, Wells moved to New York in the 1970’s to attend Columbia for a film degree. He quickly became an active personality within the shifting avant garde of his day. Close friends were John-Michael Tebelak, creator of Godspell, and poet-laureate John Ashbery. In the 2000s, he participated in Tom Beale's Honey Space, perhaps the last bastion of bohemia in New York, given a front page color spread in the New York Times headlined "No Windows, No Heat, No Staff, No Rent".
Wells generally works in series, of gouache on paper. Much of his output manifests in archaic forms seldom seen in the contemporary art world: scrolls, folding screens, painted environments, ceremonial fans, postcards, and paper ephemera. He has created a number of room and window installations, and has also developed singing performances which draw on an appreciation of music of all ages. His dream project is a celebratory circumambulation of Bethesda Fountain, involving all the arts including music, poetry, dance, theatre, painting and sculpture, to be dedicated to the glory of New York City.
Roots in New York are deep: Wells is the scion of a Dutch family which arrived shortly after the Mayflower. Their farm, the Wyckoff House in Brooklyn, is the first building to be studied in American architecture. It was donated by Wells' grandfather to the City of New York and is now a museum. https://wyckoffmuseum.org/
John Wells created four Scrolls, two in 1977 and two in 1987. Each is 60 feet long, of gouache on architectural grid paper. Since 2019, Wells has been developing a fifth scroll.
The Scrolls are stream of consciousness images and symbols, numbers, letters, phrases, abstraction and accidents, delineating subjects from the personal to the social, historical, literary and liturgical. Crosses and ankhs mingle with imps, trees, triangles, penises. The twelve permutations of the name of God, the tetragrammaton, are scrambled amidst untamed passages of paint strokes going in every direction. English, Latin, German, French, Arabic, Chinese are all found here. There is a Tibetan mantra for getting warm when freezing cold -- “ahahahahahahahahahahaha” -- as experienced and related by a traveling English noblewoman in the 19th Century. Fragments of requiem masses, names of friends who have passed, lines from the Orphic mysteries emerge and submerge. Words from Schutz’s "Missa Exequiem," written for the Elector of Saxony and inscribed inside his coffin, are woven in: “Naked from my mother’s womb have I come and naked shall I return thither.” Erudite in these areas, Wells points out that this is not a canonical Roman mass but a Protestant one which does not follow precedent. “Gracious Jesus enlighten my eyes that I may not fall asleep in death, that my enemies may never say they have prevailed against me” is a Psalm, set to music in a motet he happened to be listening to while painting. Wells’ favorite line is from a Byzantine carving of the Agnus Dei: “Mors ego sum mortis vocor agnus sum leo fortis”, or “I am the death of death, I am called a lamb, I am a strong lion.”
The Scrolls have been installed five times: at the Palais Royal in Paris; Barbara Braathen Gallery, New York City; Honey Space, New York City; the Moscow Art Fair of 2011; and for the Gladdening Light Symposium in Winter Park, Florida in February 2013.