Wesley Kramer
Wesley Kramer
Grew up in Belvidere, IL exploring the woods and having adventures with my little brother. Graduated from Northern Illinois University with a Bachelors of Fine Arts, emphasis in printmaking. After graduating I had the opportunity to move to St. Louis to work for Tom Huck, a world-famous printmaker at Evil Prints as an assistant printmaker. Gaining a lot of knowledge and skills after two years I decided to move on to graduate school. Currently, I’m in my third year as an MFA student at the University of Oklahoma.
From my art practice, I have created an alternate world that reflects our own and the issues within it. Comparing the two worlds in a few ways, one being through environmental issues. These problems are either man-made or natural disasters, disrupting the balance and order of my universe. The stories that I have developed for this world revolve around the characters that may have not made the best decisions, but are trying their best to help out their world and fellow companions. In these narratives, I have created a series of characters that exist in their own reality, where I build up the environment that they thrive in to show the changes in how they progress. By filling this world with humor, whimsical environments, and chunky creatures, I entice the viewer to participate in my world in a physical and emotional one too. As these stories progress, I expand the world visually and narratively, showing how a character's actions can impact the people and environment they live in. While showing these characters' interactions with one another in my prints, I ask the viewer to reflect, thinking about how our own actions affect the world around us.