Unfinished stories with Mike Wedge
Mike Wedge and his surreal oil paintings, March 2026 visiting artist at The Gallery
Mike Wedge arrived at The Gallery, ready to chat about his new collection of oil paintings. I opened up the voice memo app on my phone and hit record while we talked. The resulting transcript of the conversation is hilariously inaccurate, as it was recorded from my pocket, muffling words like “cheetah” into “cheese” and such, but I’m going to try my best to reform its contents into little stories about each painting.
So here we go. Let’s see what’s on the wall.
LEVER
It’s important to know that much of our conversation was peppered with delightful little jokes and bits like this first exchange:
“This is Lever, Oil on canvas, 18x24”
“Very good, 18x24, now…how did you decide how many inches to include?”
“Well, I went to Michael’s…”
You’ll have to excuse me, I’m new to this kind of thing, so I’m still learning the right kinds of questions to ask artists about their work.
In Lever, we see a ram pushing on a tree, and two humans opposite him, pushing back. “There’s a little bit of danger there,” says Mike, which he notes is common in many of his paintings. “I called it lever because I wanted to make it look like the tree was the fulcrum…so they're trying to do something and the animal's trying to do the other thing is the idea.” A conflict between humans and nature.
SQUAWK BOX
Mike claims this painting as his favorite of the show, and I think it might be mine too. I love the dramatic lighting, especially on that central fellow’s hoodie, and loved to hear the story behind the reference photos for this painting: “I took those reference pictures of those actual people in my classroom on a sunny day with the light coming through the window…they're all teachers that I've worked with.” Mike is the elementary school art teacher at Geneseo Central.
I asked if they were actually holding rakes. “No, they were holding rolled up pieces of paper. And then I put the rakes in later. This was probably 4 years ago that I took their pictures.”
I love the fact that he had this seedling of an idea 4 years ago in the back of his brain. It gives me hope that some of the ideas that I’ve had but not yet acted on will sprout up some day when the time is right.
“I still have reference pictures that I took…I don't know what I'm gonna do with them yet…but I just have this little folder on my computer that says reference pictures.” And I love that these photos are sitting patiently, waiting to be painted someday, like a little packet of seeds waiting to be planted.
Mike’s painted colleagues are attempting to rake up old speakers called squawk boxes. “I was trying to think of an animal that would be bothering them while they were trying to rake those up…I thought of animals that squawk and all I could think of were seagulls. Also, I think it's interesting when seagulls aren't near the water.”
SORTING
“Are the bees giant or is she tiny?” Again, you can see, I’m working on my questioning skills. Mike confirms that the bees are giant.
“It's surrealism, you can change the scale of things…you can do whatever you want. That's why I like surrealism…you can mess with reality.”
“So she's at the dry cleaners and she's sorting through the clothes and the bees are helping her. They're not trying to bother her. Or they are trying to bother her. I guess it depends on what you want to see.”
Mike’s wife, Natalie, posed for a reference photo for this painting.
“She doesn’t seem bothered by them.”
”Right. And that's a big part of it, too.” Mike notes about the whole collection of paintings that the creatures and the humans in the paintings are all seemingly at ease. “They're all kind of coexisting.”
EXAM
In Exam, we see oversized lab mice roaming a classroom in disarray. This one might be the exception to the “unbothered coexistence” theme.
While most of his paintings are planned out in advance, this one required a bit of improvisation toward the end. A wriggling mousetail fills an otherwise empty corner, leading the chaos off the canvas. A clock signaling almost-lunchtime is added on the wall. I love the idea that a painting can evolve beyond its initial intent, and small details can kick the chaos up a notch.
Mike’s son makes an appearance in this one, painted from a reference photo taken in a high school teacher’s classroom. He recalls moving all the desks, photographing Asher in this position on a desk, and then moving everything back where it was…sort of.
“Have you ever asked someone to take a reference picture and they've been like, “uhh, no.?”
”No, I haven’t, they’re always cooperative…but I still feel strange about it.”
”What’s the strangest scenario you’ve requested a reference photo for?”
”I'll have to think about that and get back to you.”
He has yet to get back to me, but I hope it’s something wild.
MOVERS
“Somebody asked me what's in the boxes. I don’t know. Something heavy, clearly. Because it looks like they're struggling.”
”Definitely. Maybe anvils?”
“Hmm. Yeah. Just a lot of anvils.”
LIFT
“Okay. I was at Matthew's Kia in Greece. And I saw my car up high, and I was like, whoa, that's kind of surreal. So I put my car in a tree.”
He mentions he’s seen a car up in a tree locally, too, referring to Tree Creations, a network of treehouses connected by rope bridges out on Lakeville Groveland Road. We discuss how to get a car into a tree and decide that you’d need a winch and a hoist, neither of us really knowing what either of those things are.
“So this is another one where the humans and animals are just coexisting.”
He chose the cheetahs as a counterpart to the cars because they’re known for their speed, but here as the mechanics work on the cars, the cheetahs are at rest, calmly observing.
“When I was a kid, cheetahs went 60 miles an hour, and now they say they go 80 miles an hour, which is crazy.”
”Wow, inflation.”
We laugh and agree that not even cheetah speed is safe from inflation.
PIVOT
“Is that a Friend’s reference?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, good. Tell me about this one.”
“I know I wanted people carrying a couch. And I wanted an animal to be making it harder for them…so they're carrying a cow. At first, I didn't paint it right. I made it way too yellow. It was the same color as the path. But then it was almost like the golden calf and they're carrying it on an altar, and I didn't want to go in that direction, that's just not the meaning I was going for.”
He repainted the cow in a more brown tone. No need to scrap the whole painting. With a little persistence, you can rework artwork when it doesn’t turn out the way you wanted.
HIGH RISE
In High Rise we see two human window washers and two tiger window washers, strung up on the side of a building.
“We don't know how high the building is, because we don't see the sky or the ground. I have a fear of heights. And that's kind of why I wanted to do it.”
Mike first made a color study of this piece in acrylic on a smaller scale, liked the way that turned out, so went big with oil and canvas. If you’ve been around Main Street at all this month, you might have noticed this one in the window. It’s quite striking.
There weren’t any available reference photos for tiger window washers, unfortunately, so Mike extrapolated what the shadows and reflections might look like, making it up as he painted, trying to figure out the difference between the window reflections and the shadows on the window frames.
We’re standing outside on the sidewalk in front of the window where this painting sits, chatting about these helpful window-washing tigers. A “Mr. Wedge!!!!!!!” rings out from the open window of a car driving by.
Mr. Wedge is loved.
What’s your favorite part of the process of making your art?
“I like when you first start putting the reference picture on the canvas, when you first start turning it into paint. The underpainting. Like for Squawk Box, I painted the whole canvas brown first. And then I scratched into the paint, the shapes. And the lines. So you get the composition done. And then you let the paint dry and paint over it.”
What do you hope people take away from your art?
“I hope that they are a little confused and ask a lot of questions about it, or of themselves. And maybe aren’t completely satisfied when they look at it. Because it’s not a bowl of fruit. It’s weird. I’m weird. Reality’s weird. So my paintings should be weird. They’re like an unfinished story almost.”
Aren’t we all unfinished stories? That’s a question for you, dear reader.
High Rise, oil on canvas, by Mike Wedge
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for taking the time to learn a bit about the artwork of Mr. Mike Wedge. We hope you’ll get a chance to see these oil paintings in person and let your mind wander into each surreal scene.
-Joanna @ The Gallery