bio:

Scott Espeseth's quirky, fastidiously crafted graphite drawings may have something in common with the final, cliff hanger panels of such old serialized Sunday newspaper comics as Flash Gordon and Steve Canyon that always ended with the tease, "To be continued...."

After studying an Espeseth drawing, the viewer might be left with an unsettled feeling that something momentous just happened in the narrative, is happening or is about to happen. In what might now seem like an eerie predictor of what would become a commonplace scene everywhere in post-Katrina New Orleans, Espeseth's 2004 drawing, "Flooded Room," shows a lake rising to the curtain valances in someone's living-room. The central subject of "Left Out" is an untouched platter of pork chops and french fries. The repast has been abandoned in a grassy field under a Van Gogh-like star-studded sky. The scene might suggest that Manet's luncheon in the grass had to be suddenly called off because of darkness. "Asteroid" shows a potato-shaped meteor of indeterminate size hurtling through space, perhaps on a collision course with Earth. As Gilda Radner's Roseanna Roseannadanna was wont to say, "If it isn't one thing, it's another. It's always something."

Typically, Espeseth's drawings are scarcely larger than a few inches from side to side. But like the etchings of Goltzius and Rembrandt, forbears whom Espeseth much admires, the artist's miniature worlds appear to be almost infinitely detailed, with every blade of grass delineated.

Espeseth is a professor of art at Beloit College, Beloit, Wisconsin. His most recent museum show, titled "Backyard Premonitions," was mounted in the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Art and Letters galleries in the new Overture Center, Madison, WI. His drawings have also been exhibited in the Milwaukee Art Museum and numerous other museums and galleries, most of them in the midwest.

exhibition history: