About the artist

Grant Wells was born in Denver and grew up in Larkspur, Colorado where he developed an early interest in drawing as a way of investigating the forest and wildlife around him.  As a boy he would affix drawings to trees, sketch animals, and make rubbings of various textures.  A reserved child, in school Grant was sometimes bullied but often excelled among his peers, cultivating a love of art in the margins and on the back of assignments.  As a teenager Grant's interests in the arts and humanities grew to occupy most of his time, often opting to spend his lunch period in the art classroom.

 

In college Grant pursued a dual major in drawing and painting but a sudden onset of symptoms, resulting in a later diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, forced him to recover at home where daily struggles with voices, medications, and substance abuse were nearly all-consuming for the next ten years of his life.  After regaining direction, Grant returned to college to earn a BFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Colorado Denver in 2022.  Much of his art today is impacted by adverse experiences with mental health, spiritual crisis, and recovery.

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Grant Wells considers himself to be an essentially self-taught artist and believes life and academia are what one makes for themselves.  Grant now focuses on painting large-scale oil and acrylic scenes, depicting the figure in symbolic/surreal experiences and emotionally charged atmospheres.  His goal is to develop a unique practice in expressionistic realism that evokes vivid presence, as if transported to an absent or lost reality.

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In my studio practice, I create paintings that delimit my perception of the human condition, with consideration for topics in philosophy, literature, psychology, and religion, in the contexts of lucidity and schizophrenia.  I like to visually contrast moments of truth with the dissonance of uncertainty and paranoia as they relate to empirical knowledge, intuition, and illusion.  I paint primarily to convey my ideas positively through an approach to realism that I fell emulates dreamlike aspects of the hallucination and/or supernatural experience.  Overall, my work is a non-political, faith-based approach to the humanities meant to allay distortions and relate the viewer to the invisible and/or unknown.