Scrambled Eggs Interview Series: Kaleb Wesolek
Kaleb Wesolek at the reception of his solo show, Portraits of Temporary People, at Available Space Art Projects on September 21, 2023. Image by Mustafa Diallo.
Interview with Kaleb Wesolek
By Emmanuel “Manny” Muñoz and Charlene Elma
In preparation for artist Kaleb Wesolek’s first solo exhibition, Portraits of Temporary People at Available Space Art Projects last September, we met him in his studio for an in-person interview. This is that conversation.
MM: Let’s start with where you’re from.
KW: I was born and raised in Vegas, but my dad is from Chicago and my mom's from Hawaii.
MM: Does that influence your work in significant ways?
KW: As I've gotten older, I’ve had a lot of appreciation for Vegas. I think this place has been really comforting. Sometimes too comforting. I'm thankful for growing up here and I think it's been a good environment for me. I feel like I have a bit of an identity crisis, along with a lot of people that are mixed race. Some people, especially artists, find so much inspiration from their culture, ancestors or people in their family. And I feel like I haven't had that even coming from such a rich culture, you know?
MM: Where does it come from instead?
KW: I felt like I needed to be in tune with that. But it just wasn't who I was and didn't make sense for my art. Instead, I think about the things I do on a daily basis. I watch videos, so I do portraits of people in videos. Like the Fantano one. That is a completely different context that would only exist in this day and age. Like people doing portraits of movie scenes, for instance. That's a new thing because it’s not something that existed when Old Masters were making paintings.
Kaleb Wesolek, Study of online music critic, Anthony Fantano, colored pencil on paper, 2023
CE: The artist's job throughout history has been documentation, and artists back in the day had to document what was right in front of them. And in a way you're doing the exact same thing, documenting what's in front of you, like the videos you're watching.
KW: Yeah and I think also, reading more is what I want to try to do. The times I have read with the intention of coming up with an idea or getting inspiration have really worked. Carl Jung’s book, A Man and His Symbols, is where the idea for Instinctive Beings came from. It's basically talking about the dormant side of our brains, but he's also comparing us to animals and how we react on instinct. I immediately had that image in my brain. It was me next to some animal, but framed like a portrait, you know. We’re sharing the same exact amount of space, we're the same size.
Kaleb Wesolek, Instinctive Beings, colored pencil on paper, 11 ⅝” by 8 ¼” 2023
MM: You're saying a lot with the image of a portrait. Many people might see a portrait and see it as a study of someones face. This piece didn't come from looking at someone's face, you’re getting it from reading a passage. Why portraiture to express those ideas?
KW: I think the reason I do portraiture so much is because doing faces was something I always considered to be one of the hardest things you can do, so that's where I started. Doing self-portraits was easy. By using myself as a reference, I found myself doing portraits more often. But when it comes to what you're saying, someone might just see a portrait and think it’s just a rendering of a face. They'll see something and they're like, “Oh, that's cool, you drew that,” and they don't really move past that point. But for people more invested in the art, they care about the context and that's where the meaning of it comes from. Portraiture has a lot of meaning for me and I can tell more stories through that.
MM: Do you try to explain the context within your drawings or is that left up to the viewer’s interpretation?
KW: I'm actually not a fan of explaining, especially in design. My art is really influenced by design and I think if you can show something without having to spell it out literally, it’s much more successful, and there's a lot more nuance to something that tells a story without writing it out.
Artist Kaleb Wesolek in his studio. Image by Charlene Elma.
KW: This is storage for all of my materials. I have been using this table for everything for the longest time. But because it was in my old room, I didn't have that much space to do stuff. But now that I moved out, I use this as my palette table. So right now, I have all my colored pencils here. But when I'm doing oil painting, I'll move this stuff and use my oil palette. One of the things that I really like about having moved out is I can just leave the materials out. I found that if there’s less barriers for you to create, then it's easier to.
MM: Yeah, it's more accessible. You can get into it.
KW: I do want to make a really nice rolling palette table with a big sheet of glass, but that’s for the future. (Capricorn!)
MM: I noticed you don't have anything on the walls. Is that because you just moved in?
KW: Yeah, but also, I don't know if I want to put anything on the walls. I will, but I don't know how I want to do it. Sometimes, especially in the studio, I don’t like to look at too many things.
MM: That's a dilemma for artists. Some have their walls full of references and other people's art and then some artists can’t look at anything because their minds will go places they don’t want to go.
CE: How did you go about mixing your colors?
KW: I'll usually do a palette and mix a small amount. I have a lot of practice with seeing color, seeing certain things and trying to make that kind of color. Color is such a complex thing. Like for this orange here, it might actually be the same value as another orange, but it's more saturated so it looks different.
CE: How do you make colors more saturated?
KW: You use more of the base pigment. I only have the primaries. I don't have any extra colors. I like to keep it simple. That's why it’s taking me so long to wrap my head around the colored pencils. There's so many choices. You can make wrong choices very easily. It’s easier to be more subtle. This (shows us a painting on his desk) was a study I did the other day because I haven't painted in probably like six months. I've mostly been doing colored pencil, exploring that for a while. And this is soft pastel, which is still technically a painting. I think even colored pencil, the way I'm doing it, is considered a painting.
CE: Because you're painterly with the material?
KW: Yeah. If you think about a drawing versus a painting, it's more so what techniques you are using to make a piece, you know
CE: And what would you say are the biggest differences between drawing and painting?
KW: I think definitely with painting, its color and shape. Technique defines if you're making a painting or not, because when you're drawing, especially with only one color, it's about value. With painting, you're more focused on the shapes. I've learned a lot from painting when it comes to drawing, like looking at forms differently. And that's what I did with that mummy drawing, too, it’s just shapes.
Kaleb Wesolek, All Royals, colored pencil on paper, 11 ⅝” by 8 ¼” 2023
MM: Remind me again what you've studied at UNLV?
KW: Graphic design.
MM: What made you want to pursue art as opposed to design? You do graphic design as your job, but what's the difference between art and design?
KW: There's two big parts of me. One is the design side and the art side, but the art was always first, honestly. When it came to schooling and education in general, I saw design as a place where I could be a little bit more analytical and maybe make more money than being an artist, you know? I wish I would have pursued doing art because the first major I declared was actually painting, but I changed it to graphic design. I'm thankful for design. I've learned so much about composition and I’ve found a love for type and letters and numbers in general.
CE: And how do you go about picking the letters and numbers that you incorporate in your work?
KW: Usually I have some letters that I favor a little bit more. I think “A” is definitely one I do a lot. Some letters are not very interesting, but others, you can make really cool just by the way they're shaped. “A” is a more complex letter. I feel like you can do more stuff with it. Something like “C” is not as fun to draw for me.
CE: The universe of typography feels so safe for me because these letter forms are so familiar but we can push them so far and create magic within a letter that’s universal. I’m obsessed with the letter “A” too. It is the beginning of language and communication for so many different dialects. It's a crazy letter.
KW: That’s what I was going to say, “A” actually represents a lot. It's something that has form, it has a meaning behind it, it conveys information, the letter “A” is actually such a complex thing to think about.
CE: The letter “A” is this universe on its own. And going back to the way portraiture is sometimes seen, “that's just a letter ‘A’ and this is just a portrait,” but, there's entire universes within the two.
MM: Is that also how you approach portraits?
KW: A lot of my work begins from people off Instagram reels. Random people that I thought had interesting faces and I just took a screenshot of. I enjoy doing this because it’s also a portrait in motion since it came from a video. Then, I need to figure out how to use it. At first it's kind of just a mundane photo. But I feel like I’m creating a much different context. This is the guy I’m drawing right now, you might not even know what's going on, but it feels different, right? And obviously, I do other things like change the shape of the figure. I’ve elongated his neck and made everything really square. That’s where these things end up. It's a fleeting moment made concrete. Any other day I would have just scrolled past it and it wouldn't have been a portrait. But now I've kind of solidified it and it's a physical thing.
CE: Now that I know how you take them out of context, I can look at this picture and imagine, “what else could this be?” You also have an infinite resource of references.
MM: Even in one video you have thousands of possible images that you can make.
Kaleb Wesolek, Desert Walker, colored pencil on paper, 11 ⅝” by 8 ¼” 2023. | Zach Justice (@zachjustice). Instagram, May 18, 2022.
KW: That was an issue I was trying to solve for myself because I'm not always able to make things purely from imagination.
MM: Do you ever purposely open Instagram in search for a screenshot?
KW: No, there's a point where I notice something and think it's cool. And then I get excited, I get a little feeling, it makes me excited to draw and that's the moment I take a screenshot. Sometimes I'll start it. And then sometimes I won’t.
MM: What's next for you in terms of your art?
KW: I think every day, I'm asking that question. My main goal in terms of my art is to try to remain motivated to continue completing new pieces. I’ve struggled with staying consistent or motivated, but I’ve found that I create things I’m proud of when I remain diligent and continue working. My main goal is to just keep drawing. I think also trying to work larger and be more ambitious, intending to complete new work to show. I want my work to feel more narratively driven and complex. I try to remind myself that the satisfaction I get simply by the act of creating is ultimately why I do it.
For more of Kaleb Wesolek, follow him on Instagram @kalebmax_ and Scrambled Eggs @scrambledeggsxyz.
Scrambled Eggs is an artist-run collective and gallery based in Las Vegas working to build artistic permanence in Nevada. More interviews in the Scrambled Eggs Artist Interview series can be found here.
Posted and published by Wendy Kveck on February 18, 2024.