ROYCE WEATHERLY

SOMETHING ABOUT NOTHING

NOVEMBER 15 – DECEMBER 20, 2025

Potato and Two Potatoes are part of a series that I began back around 1990 just trying to find my way back into painting. I had made very little work since moving to New York in 1986, but saw a lot of art. Much of it was very smart looking and highly finished and came with rich conceptual backstories. The art looked aware of itself as a commodity. As much as I enjoyed looking and working with the art and artists, I felt I had nothing to add to that conversation. I wanted to make paintings that needed no explanation, that I could show to my peers as well as my parents without confusion or loss of integrity. I used the potato as a stand-in for a subject; something to get the painting rolling, establishing the basic figure / ground / light / color relationships. By my own metrics, the potato was the right balance between meaningful and meaningless, common yet valuable, easy to make but hard to get right, much like painting itself.

Old Fashioned is a small group of my kind of stuff. The skinned orange is about 5 weeks old as pictured. Manet painted some great oranges by the way. The gall is from my next-door neighbor’s oak tree and is the tree’s response to insects like wasps and mites. It isolates their eggs and in effect builds them a home till they mature. It is 5 years old. The telephone jack is a US type RJ-11, invented in the 1970’s, it made it easier for consumers to install their own phones and accessories. The internet used to connect on these, it’s about 50 years old. The 1 lb. weight came from the basement of American Fine Arts Gallery in Soho. They had moved from E. 6th St. to Wooster St. and were cleaning out the basement for art storage. They found a heavy box of mixed old industrial weights and said I could have them if I moved them. I have been moving them ever since. I do not know what they were used for or why some of them were covered in masking tape, but they always looked like they wanted to be in paintings. The weight is about 100 years old. The rock is a piece of basalt that came from the shore of Lake Superior in Duluth, Minnesota. I picked it up from a pile of similar rocks as a souvenir of my trip. It feels really good in your hand, and I can never quite comprehend that it is 1.1 billion years old. I used the rinds from the orange to make Bourbon Old Fashioneds at the end of a day.

The leaf in E. 6th St. NYC was from the Callery pear trees that lined the street outside of American Fine Arts in the East Village, my friend Peter Hopkins showed there. The fall colors of the pear trees were always great, ranging from orange-reddish to dark bronze-purples. I tried to match the color but had a humbling experience trying to replicate the complex beauty of nature’s colors.

St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, NYC is the oldest piece in the show. It was painted in 1988 as a monochrome that had a dried red pepper and a lump of coal sitting on the top edge of the painting, kind of a still life. I was really interested in amber and varnish and old brown paintings at the time. They looked strangely new. One day I picked up this yellow leaf that had fallen from the maple trees in the graveyard of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral on Mott St. in NYC. I wanted to see how close it was to the yellow of the monochrome painting in my studio. Amazingly it was a perfect match. I was attempting to hold the moment and with some inspiration from Arte Povera I taped the leaf to the painting. I enjoyed watching it dry and fade. The painting has changed at a slower rate than the leaf and remains a record of that fall color. The tears in the leaf are from my wife’s critical cat, Beez.

I have always liked this little painting (The next to last day of Summer). I was in a hurry after work, walking home to my young family. It must have been the afternoon. I was walking along Prince St, near Mulberry, when I looked up and the sky was so beautiful. Just a perfect clear blue September sky with no glare like when you are looking at something bright from within a shadow. I stopped, letting its perfection soak in for a minute then headed home. I had been working on a color chart of different things for an exhibition in L.A. and had been thinking about time and place and color ideas like the leaf paintings, so this little piece came out of that, plus a dose of James Turrell’s Skyspace which I had seen when it first re-opened at PS-1 in 1986.

There is an old, badly processed color photo that I used as a reference for Studio 1997. It was made to finish off a roll of film. I was trying to get something out of my head. Sometimes things seem too obvious to me, but it helps to see them anyway, sometimes I am surprised. In making still life paintings, Morandi is one of the artists I have learned from and learned to work around. The plastic containers were used in the studio for mineral spirits, solvents and cleaning brushes. I hoped that contemporary materials and their utilitarian nature would free them enough to make my homage less deadly than it might have been. Plus, I wanted to use a wiffleball in a painting.

Royce Weatherly

Royce Weatherly (b. 1957, Winston-Salem, North Carolina) is an American painter and recipient of the 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship. He received his BA from Wake Forest University (1980) and his MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1984).