Timothy Wehrle

b. 1978

Timothy Wehrle, a self-taught artist from Iowa, was born in 1978.  He has chosen not to pursue artistic training as he felt it would compromise his pure creative vision.  He created intricate drawings that carefully blend nostalgic yearnings with stark depiction of everyday life in rural, middle America.  His detailed drawings are influenced by Persian miniatures, comic books, sacred mandalas, folk art quilting, and the kaleidoscopic drawings of Swiss artist Adolph Wölfli. These complex and layered images are exploring subjectivity and personal experiences, as the artist himself is often positioned as the central figure.  His obsessive drawings are rendered in color pencils and graphite.  They are patchworks of scenes both real and imagined.  Wehrle began exhibiting in 2003 and soon gained a large following via the major NY outsider art galleries.  Wehrle orchestrates a harmony of patterns in each of his pieces by bordering Persian miniatures with mandalas and psychedelia.  He currently lives and works in Oxford, Iowa and was the subject of the 2012 solo exhibition The Drawing Season: I Don’t Understand You and I Never Will at John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

 His work, one of the favorites of my eldest daughter, was one of the first artists she liked to point out on home art tours.  Check out the hypnotist, it was the first Wehrle that I acquired.