Artworks by Deke Wightman

For 35 years I worked as an animator, character layout artist, and story artist in film and television, on productions including The Peanuts TV Specials, The Simpsons, Archer, Winnie-the-Pooh, and Ferngully. I also taught storyboarding and animation at the California Institute of the Arts. Through all of it, I was fascinated by the same thing: how little it takes to reveal a character. A glance. A gesture. A tilt of the head. The right pose can tell an audience an entire story. Now I look for those moments in paint. Somebody is an ongoing series of portraits built from loose marks, unexpected color, and deliberately imperfect shapes. I’m less interested in making a perfect likeness than in finding the moment when a collection of marks suddenly expresses a person and the moment in that person's life. Each portrait is one still. A painting of somebody, mid-story.