This Ordinary Radiance: Paintings by Joel Sheesley
This Ordinary Radiance: Paintings by Joel Sheesley
Nov. 7, 2025 - Feb. 19, 2026
Artist Reception & Talk
Saturday, Nov. 15 1:00 PM
Gallery Hours:
M-Th 4:30 - 7:30 PM
F/S 1:00 - 4:00 PM
*closed during university breaks & holidays
Exhibition Statement:
Inherent in the idea of “landscape” is that land, an unbounded phenomenon, can be circumscribed. It can be sampled in discreet segments and pictured. The pictures of land that we create are shaped by the use that we imagine for land. The same landscape is pictured differently in the mind of a real estate developer, a wheat farmer, a coal miner, or an artist. I picture landscape as a basis for esthetic contemplation. I’m working within the tradition of landscape painting because the picture of land that painting produces presupposes a sympathetic relationship between land and the hand of the artist.
This sympathy invites respect and admiration for landscape in its natural state even as it embraces the inexorable prospect of human intervention in the land.
Bio:
Joel Sheesley is a painter whose fifty-year artistic path has embraced a variety of genres. About ten years ago he turned toward landscape painting and has been captivated by it ever since. Sheesley is professor emeritus at Wheaton College where he taught painting for forty-two years. He has exhibited his work locally and nationally in galleries and museums. He recently completed artistic residencies with The Conservation Foundation, the Edith Farnsworth House, The Forest Preserve District of DuPage, and the Shirley Heinze Land Trust. Joel Sheesley’s studio and home are in Wheaton where he lives with his wife Joan.
