Clover Press Celebrates the Recent Works of the Acclaimed Painter

(September 22, 2020) Acclaimed artist Aron Wiesenfeld is renowned for his enigmatic paintings, featuring figures in solitary landscapes that capture a sense of melancholy, isolation, and of leaving innocence behind. Now Clover Press is celebrating the artist’s most recent works in Travelers, a new book featuring over 100 pages of the artist’s paintings completed since 2014, curated and designed by the artist himself. Travelers is funding now on Kickstarter.

Travelers is a 10″ x 10″ full color art book featuring the Southern California artist’s latest artwork, in which he uses various tools, including oils, charcoal, watercolor, and pencil. Wiesenfeld transforms a blank canvas into beautiful images portraying eerie and soul touching figures of despair and hope. His subjects appear to be outsiders in their world, more comfortable being part of the scenery surrounding them.

Wiesenfeld’s paintings have garnered attention with artists and critics alike:

“Aron Wiesenfeld. Like Hopper he is concerned with solitude, like Magritte he is bewitched by mystery.” —Guillermo Del Toro

“Like a master chef balancing flavors, Aron creates a perfect visual feast, pairing subtle color palettes with suggestive narratives, atmospheres and moods.”—Juxtapoz

“Quiet scenes of youthful melancholy and mystery.”—Colossal

“Beautifully-rendered and atmospheric.”—Hi-Fructose

“There is a richness in Aron’s color even when it appears to be a grey cheerless world filled with ghosts.  The viewer can be both charmed and haunted by his work. Categorizing his painting style can also elude us. Surrealism doesn’t seem to be the perfect classification. Both cartoonist and classic realist seem to equally apply. I don’t know Aron well, but if an artist’s work is a representation of themselves, it makes me want to know this very original enigma of an artist better.”— William Wray

Wiesenfeld is a former comic book artist who provided covers for the seminal series Y The Last Man, and illustrated comics for Marvel, Image and DC. Today he lives in San Diego, with his wife, and son, and devotes his time to painting. He is currently preparing for his 11th one-person exhibition of paintings and drawings. This is his first book with Clover Press.

“I have known Robbie Robbins and Ted Adams for a long time,” said Wiesenfeld. “They were the original founders of IDW publishing, which as a company always had the highest standards of quality. IDW published my first book, The Well, which was a top notch production –  from the design, all the way through to the paper stock and the print quality. So when Robbie told me that he and Ted had left IDW to form their own boutique publisher that would focus on the projects they were passionate about, and that they wanted one of their first projects to be my new book, I was honored and thrilled, to say the least!

“The new book, Travelers, picks up where The Well left off. It includes artworks from 2014 to the present. As proud as I am about my first book, I have to say, Travelers is better. The Well covered 15 years of artmaking, and included a lot of my early development as a painter. Travelers is more cohesive stylistically, and it’s also arranged thematically, like a story. Flipping through it, one can see a central character traveling through seasons and landscapes, and the juxtaposition of images suggests potential stories to the reader, which is always what I try to do in my paintings individually.”

Travelers features a wonderful introduction by the New York-based art critic Kimberly Powers. She writes, “Wiesenfeld’s paintings are rife with deeply hidden allegory and art historical references, spanning from Byzantine tapestries to the 19th century movements of Tonalism (with a wink and nod to Whistler’s nocturnes) and landscapes influenced by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. He traverses the realms of narrative painting like a 21st century time traveler, taking us along on his journey, so that we all become companions on his voyage of artistic discovery.”

The Travelers campaign has multiple tiers, including a softcover; a hardcover; a hardcover slipcase; and hardcovers with limited edition archival prints. For updates, follow Wiesenfeld on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook and follow Clover Press on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

To support the campaign, visit Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloverpress/aron-wiesenfelds-travelers-art-book.

About the artist: Aron Wiesenfeld is an American painter renowned for enigmatic work. His figures in solitary landscapes capture a sense of departure and of leaving innocence behind. Decidedly contemporary, the scenes are redolent of disaffected youth, alienated from society and adrift in magical environments, be it floating on boats amidst glittering leaves or swarmed by a flamboyance of butterflies in a field. At the same time they also give subtle nods to the history of painting: his elongated figures echo the Mannerism of El Greco; sunset waters, the Impressionism  of Monet. The influence of American painting also flows strongly  through his work: a girl on a rock recalls Andrew Wyeth’s ‘Christina’  turned around to face us, and the sparse solitude of Edward Hopper finds a new voice, albeit tempered with a sense of the fantastical.  Wiesenfeld’s work brings these diverse influences together in paintings  that explore the experience of uncertainty, and the abandonment of the familiar for a journey into the unknown.

About Clover Press: Headed by IDW co-founders Ted Adams and Robbie Robbins, Clover Press publishes a wide variety of collected and original content ranging from classic reprints of The Wizard of Oz to the latest in horror graphic novels. Clover Press is working with a wide variety of creators including Kevin Eastman, Craig & Clizia Yoe, Steve Niles, Gabriel Rodriguez, Ken Fisher, Matt Bors, and more.