Troubled toons - John Wesley, pop art

Art in America, Feb, 1993 by Ken Johnson

As it happens, Wesley's receptiveness to the unconscious is reflected in his working circumstances. Since 1978 he and his wife, the writer Hannah Green, have lived for about half of every year in a small rural village in central France. Wesley has made it his habbit to conceive images in gouache on paper while in France and later to work them up into acrylic-on-canvas pictures in his Brooklyn studio. (The gouaches are fully complete works on pages measuring around 24 to 30 inches; the canvases tend toward heights or widths of 5 or 6 feet.) Wesley's description of the French half of his process is telling: "It's a great dream time for me there," he says, affirming what you feel from the paintings - that pictures are not cerebrally figured out, but rather emerge like hypnagogic images from the mind's shadows.(3)

Of all his public domain sources, the one Wesley has been most involved with has been the comic strip Blondie and, in particular, that archetypal American Everyman, the inept, well-meaning, endlessly frustrated mediocrity Dagwood Bumstead. In a 1974 interview, Wesley explained his interest in the strip. Speaking of the first Blondie paintings, a series called "Searching for Bumstead" produced in 1973, in which each of the rooms of the Bumstead house is represented devoid of people, he said, "It is really my house when I was little. Those lamps, those curtains, that chair. They were in my house then. It is really my father I am looking for. My father was like Bumstead. He was thin like Bumstead and he wore a tie to work and when he came home from work, he tipped his hat to the neighbors."(4)

Today, Wesley is ambivalent about explaining the series this way because it could narrow the meaning of the pictures and put an unintended Oedipal spin on some of them.(5) However, the point is not that the paintings should be read autobiographically; it is rather that because of Wesley's emotional investment in his imagery, the deceptively simple and ironic surface harbors unexpected depths of feeling. What you sense as you contemplate the series is not so much that Dagwood is a surrogate for the artist's father; rather, by empathizing with Dagwood and the various states he gets into, Wesley is like a novelist meditating on the imagined vicissitudes of a fictional character who may be, in some more or less direct way - like Philip Roth's Zuckerman - a surrogate for the artist himself.

In Wesley's version of Blondie, we behold scenes of drama, conflict and crisis unlike anything you'd ever find in the comic strip. In Off His Feed (1990) we find Blondie and Dagwood both naked in the bedroom, and the way Dagwood lies in bed and gazes worriedly into space suggests that something is amiss in the couple's conjugal relations. More recently, Blondie seems to have gone outside the marriage to satisfy her needs: in Blondie and Herb Woodley (1991), she appears in an adulterous situation with her long-time neighbor; and in First Kiss: Blondie Bumstead and Ynez Sanchez (1991) she's in the shower naked, kissing another woman.