About

Joshua Weathersbee holds two BFAs, in Painting and in Crafts, from Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. He also spent a summer studying in Florence and Rome. Before painting he worked in ceramics and sculpture. In 2000, on a family trip, he saw Henk Helmantel's solo exhibition at the Rembrandt House Museum and brought a book of the work back to Sammy Britt, who said, "there's no light in it." To understand what that meant, he took Britt's intro to painting class and changed his major before the semester ended.

He studied for years with Sammy Britt, and also with Tommy Thurmond, in the color lineage that runs from Charles Hawthorne through Henry Hensche. The core teaching he holds is that there are no values in nature: form is built from color changes, not light and dark. In his words, "sammy showed me the way, tommy taught me about structure, form, and the true power of color relationships." He paints with a brush because of Robin Durand.

His senior thesis was two shows at once in Cleveland, with around 100 pieces on display between them. In his first two years out of school he sold about 150 landscape oils, and Delta Magazine ran a feature on him. After college he wanted to make new work rather than landscapes, but the Mississippi galleries he approached weren't interested. He moved to Jackson and ran a vending machine route, then moved to Rochester, where he spent years working as a janitor and in a factory. Now he has returned to the studio in Ballinger, Texas. Color Studies are next, oil paint on boards.