es s ential arts
I was surprised when I met Eric Thomas Wolever. His paintings bear PVC wicker lawn chairs, white picket fences, and 1976 Ford Sedans. I expected a man 30 years his senior since I read those images as reflections of a literal past, a youth belonging to a time dead now for 40 years. What I found was a younger man—a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a Master’s in Fine Arts—whose shoulders bear the places that have grown him as if they are his bones themselves. Eric grew up in Coal Valley, Illinois, a blue-collar town of 3,000 sitting beside the Mississippi River. His interaction with art began in seventh grade when his teacher instructed the class to collect trash, hot-glue it together, and spray paint the product. Processing 40 | m a d i s o n e s s e n t i a l s
the assignment instantaneously, as if it was by instinct, he stepped outside and evenly coated his shoes in silver spray paint. Today, Eric maintains that in the following moments as he sat in detention, he knew that he was an artist and would be for the rest of his life. Admitted to art school for both undergraduate (Kansas City Art Institute) and graduate studies as a ceramics student, Eric struggled with “the medium defining titles” of the academic art world. “I feel like I never fit into that arena of the art world,” he explains. Not only did Eric wrestle with the academy’s necessity in categorizing him within a department, there were indicators early on that Eric, in fact, was engaged with a discipline that did not resonate with who he is.