Grove Wiley
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(415) 652-2141
Born and raised in Queens, NY, I graduated from Cooper Union School of Art with a B.F.A. I later went on to study at San Francisco State University, where I completed a Master's Degree in Counseling Psychology. My drawings and paintings reflect emotional and autobiographical experiences, alternating between silly, dreamlike, and melancholic. The faces and figures are expressionistic, bordering on cartoon-like. The Angsty Clown figure, a Commedia dell’Arte character with striped or droopy hat, is an alter-ego who's been showing up in my work for decades. An important jumping-off point for generating ideas has been my practice of keeping a continuous Art Journal since around 1975, Each page is a dense combination of writing, drawings and collage, with content ranging from the tragic to the ludicrous. I’m currently up to Volume 86. "Writing sensitive thoughts in my journal" is an obsessive daily ritual for me. I'm a gay man who came out in the late Seventies, when the "Gay Liberation Movement" was in full swing. I was just trying to find my way. The sad, shocking, and anger-inducing events of the AIDS epidemic were about to unfold. My artwork and journals during those years were a visual record of all the upheavals I was experiencing. And of course, many of the same themes continue on to this day.
