Royce Weatherly (b. 1957) is an American painter from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. A 2015 Guggenheim Grant recipient, Weatherly received his BA from Wake Forest University (1980), and MFA from the University of Wisconsin/Madison (1984). Over the past three decades, he has developed a profoundly simple and yet deeply enigmatic painting style that combines his peculiar Vermeer-like still lives with an eerie quietude devoid of narrative symbolism.
During his five-week residency, 2017 Inga Maren Otto Fellow, Royce Weatherly will work on the final layers of several paintings at once, as each work nears completion in slow, almost invisible increments. The artist looks forward to discussing his work and his process during his time at Watermill.
Slowly made, his works are both luminous and precise in detail, but refuse any greater meaning beyond what appears to be laid out before us. A potato, or some cooking lard, or a cellophane cigarette wrapper minus the package of cigarettes; the unnoticed are held up to scrutiny in an attempt to draw the extraordinary out of the ordinary under an intense gaze that is as much that of a philosopher, or a forensic scientist as that of a painter.
<a data-flickr-embed=”true” data-footer=”true” href=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/watermillresidencies/albums/72157687965202656″ title=”Royce Weatherly | Looking Slowly: 30 Years of Painting”><img src=”https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4435/36798107225_b23fbf7ce5_h.jpg” width=”1600″ height=”1066″ alt=”Royce Weatherly | Looking Slowly: 30 Years of Painting”></a><script async src=”//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>