It has been a long journey for Wes Lang to this nirvana-esque state as an artist. As I sit with him in a quiet corner of a hotel bar, he reflects on how he arrived at this time and place in his life. Explaining how his latest works, The Black Paintings, came to be, he credits the Taoist approach that has been his guiding principle, “I just show up and the things that need to happen just happen. I don’t try anymore; I’m just the vessel to let this stuff [the artworks] exist because it needs to exist. That’s very much the Taoist type philosophy: the universe will move through you.”
Alienation in his school years and the gift of Ram Dass’s book, Be Here Now, saw the young Lang take to the Taoist philosophy as a means to understand life and control the anxiety he felt. Looking back, he now realises that “I would lose my way with Taoism at times, and then come back and understand it. If I hadn’t been diligently practising what I need to practise, I would then implement it back into my life, and instantly feel better.”
I have known Wes Lang for the past few years. We have spent many an hour at his home or in his studio in Los Angeles “chewing the fat” about life, art and everything in between. For him, it is all on one continuum. There is no separation between who he is, what captures his attention and the artistic representation of it all. His work is a commentary on the world we live in, the daily routines through which we navigate ourselves and what the outcome of that may be.
Wes Lang in his studio in Los Angeles.
The Black Paintings are currently being exhibited at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery in London. Lang caught Hirst’s attention when the American artist transitioned from working in New York to his current studio in Los Angeles at the end of 2012, after realising he needed a change of scene for his work to progress. Over several years and for different lengths of time, he would stay at the legendary Chateau Marmont, where he turned his sojourns into an artistic residency with a series of drawings that formed the basis of an exhibition at the hotel at the end of his stay.
The City of Angels provided new sources of inspiration and, once he found the right studio, Lang’s art progressed to working on larger canvases, with a different colour palette and aesthetic. Along with Kanye West asking him to do the imagery for the Yeezus tour, the move west propelled his renown onto the global scene.
“I wanted to capture an alternative view to the divisiveness in the world right now and show people that what we are being fed is fostering a world that is becoming more divided.”
– Wes Lang
A predominant theme in Lang’s art is visual iconography. To Native Americans, totems are a graphical reference to a spirit being, sacred object or symbol of an individual or tribe. For Lang, totems are childhood reference materials that he hoarded as a kid, as he explains. “I just collected visual information in a way that I never saw anybody else doing. Not to pin on my walls though, I kept it very private, and then I would just sit and copy it.”
For Lang, the American West and Native American culture were symbols of freedom. “I had a lot of issues at school with other kids,” he comments, “and I was chastised for it and picked on for being different. We rented a little house in the Hamptons and there was a Native American reservation there. Getting away from my town and going to this place, putting on war paint, making headdresses and riding around, I felt free to be me.”
There had long been an association between the Native American people and the expression of a harmonious society in Lang’s mindset. One of the perennial characters in his large canvases are skeletal-faced braves and chiefs – the latter often in full headdress, where the totems symbolise familiar legends or lineages. Dee Brown’s book Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee recounts how the American expansion westwards impacted the Indigenous society. While the artist sees the world as potentially at a tipping point now, with “false news and made-up facts”, he admits that to some extent he is removed from it, following the Tao and living the life of a quasi-hermit in his home and studio.
Gino’s Dream, 2024. Acrylic, oil stick, coloured pencil, pencil, paper collage on canvas. © Wes Lang. All rights reserved.
This isolation, he reckons, has seen everything come together, with a progression in his abilities as an artist. “For the last five years what I have seen and been striving to do with my art has been a breakthrough that feels amazing. I’m just so fucking excited to pick up paintbrushes, and my mind is just overflowing with ideas.”
Created between 2022 and 2024, The Black Paintings are the result of this journey, a time of a sustained “laser-focused” work stream that narrates a certain dismay with the world and the direction in which all of us are being corralled. “I wanted to capture an alternative view to the divisiveness in the world right now and show people that what we are being fed is fostering a world that is becoming more divided. I found that I don’t want to live that way.” So, the solution through his art is to “show that we are actually born as vessels of love, and we are all one gigantic soul in which we are all interconnected”.
From The Black Paintings series: Left – Cloud, 2023, acrylic on canvas. Right – Ballad, 2023, acrylic on linen. © Wes Lang. All rights reserved.
The narrative for the paintings revolves around “heroes forced into scenarios where evil keeps popping up in different forms. It’s where we are in society today as we cannot escape the different faces of evil that harass us every day. It’s the perpetuation of the propaganda of people needing to take drugs to feel better.” Echoing his experience from his school days, he adds, “We are told there’s something wrong with everybody and we’re supposed to accept it. I did this work to show that these characters, when faced with evil, instead of being split apart by it, they became stronger and closer, and defeated it. It might be very basic and simple, but most things are pretty basic and simple when you break them down.”
There is now a sense of peace and equilibrium in Lang’s life. A monograph of his works to date entitled Everything was published in 2022. He is now a husband and father, creating work and simply “being”. Every day starts with the same routine, consulting the Tao, which the artist describes as “always saying exactly what I’m thinking about when I wake up, or what I need to know to get through the day. As you finish a cycle, you start again. One verse each morning, and I just think on it, and it sets me up for the day.” Unknowingly, one day his morning read of the Tao determined the completion of The Black Paintings. “As I read the last line in that morning’s verse, I realised I was going to finish this body of work.”
More about The Black Paintings exhibition at Newport Gallery in London, HERE.
Author: Andrew Hildreth
Opening image: Sunset, 2024. Acrylic, Oil Stick, Coloured pencil, pencil, paper collage on canvas. © Wes Lang. All rights reserved.
Photos of Wes Lang: Ben Walters © Wes Lang. All rights reserved.
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