Wes Sherman has been painting since 1992 and has had over 30 solo shows. He received his MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2003. He is the chair of exhibitions at The Center for Contemporary Art in Bedminster, New Jersey. Sherman has been a visiting artist at many universities among them Temple, Rutgers, and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 2011 he also received a fellowship for painting from New Jersey Council of the Arts.

The relationship I have to the nature, and my desire for an urban and rural landscape is something I often think about. In a very transcendental--Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman sort of way--I aspire for a reflective understanding of our relationship to nature. I believe we have an Arcadian ideal of nature but our very precepts often taint the ideal. Just take note of any land left untouched, in a couple of years nature will reclaim it and with enough time human presence on the land will disappear. We have a desire to control and protect the land. We also have a need to retreat to and flee from nature. The combined savagery and enlightened quietness of nature produces a very Dionysian and Apollonian sphere. For me, these paintings reflex my own conflicting experiences of the last 10 years, my rush to move to New York City and my recent retreat to a new lake cabin in northern New Jersey. This new body of work is a reflection of the many dualistic ideas I struggle with from time to time.