Drawing With Wire: Artist CW Roelle - Inside Art With Michael

Drawing With Wire: Artist CW Roelle - Inside Art With Michael

 

Artists often find supplies in surprising places. For Clifford “CW” Roelle, industrial wire procured from the same place one would buy hammers and nails is his medium of choice. With it, he crafts wire “drawings” that have the dimensional qualities of relief sculptures. Detailed, time-consuming, and exquisitely assembled, Roelle’s artworks are some of the most unique in the region.

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Born and raised in upstate New York, Roelle earned his BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art before settling here over twenty years ago. He has earned both a coveted MacColl Johnson Fellowship from the Rhode Island Foundation and a 3D Fellowship from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. His work has been featured at the Fringe Festival in Scotland and CBGB’s 313 Gallery in New York. The RISD Museum, the Attleboro Arts Museum, the New Hampshire Institute of Arts, and the Brookfield Center for Craft, among many other venues, have shown his work. And the Newport Art Museum holds his art in its permanent collection.

 

 

Roelle considers the artworks that he makes to be drawings, executed in wire rather than with a pen or a pencil. He works out of a studio in his home, where a pile of different pliers is used to contort wires of varying weights into desired shapes.

 

Asked about his medium, he answers, “Working with wire came out of a need to hold the line I was drawing in my hands. Holding a pencil felt too removed from what I was making. Aside from the tactile, the thing I enjoy most about drawing with wire is having the ability to build things in space, I don’t think of them as 3D, more like 2½D.”

 

 

For Roelle, his unique approach to art-making started during his college years, when he had a realization that led him to a more open creative practice. His experience is something that might inspire artists around him to approach their own work differently.

 

He says, “I was walking to class one morning and I could see many other students walking to the same building I was and they were all carrying projects they were working on and all the projects were different. Some were kinda crazy and some were beautiful and some were not but everyone looked excited to be carrying them and that was the moment I realized that everybody was making whatever they wanted to and I needed to stop trying to fulfill assignments and make what I thought was expected and just let my hands make what they were moved to make. That was the moment that opened myself to the possibilities of my own art making. I don’t know why it had eluded me until then, but I was grateful for the eye-opener.”

 

 

He was active in the Providence scene during its transformational moment in the late 90s and early 2000, and his art is imbued with much of the ethos of that experimental era. He lived at AS220, where he met his wife, Pamela Murray, a RISD photography alum. He was actively collected by the late Dr. Joseph Chazan and was featured in the NetWorks documentary series, which was underwritten by the noted collector. Last year, Roelle was highlighted in a major survey of NetWorks artists at the WaterFire Arts Center.

 

Actively exhibited across the region, Roelle’s wire drawings have appeared in recent shows at galleries like Nahcotta in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and 13 Forest in Arlington, Massachusetts. Starting July 26, his work will be featured in a group exhibition titled Space Odyssey at 13 Forest. He is currently hard at work creating a vast and detailed wire drawing of the International Space Station for the show. It is a challenge he takes on with excitement.

 

 

Roelle and his wife are avid collectors, and their home in Foster is filled with their work and pieces by friends and peers. Roelle aims to create art that delights and that he would display on his walls.

 

He says, “I want to make work that I enjoy, from start to finish, that I would hang in my own house and smile when I see it because it's pleasant, or cool, or interesting, or involved with a likewise narrative and I hope that if I get that out of it, others will too. I've always thought that looking at my work is like looking at a stereoview card, or Viewmaster, where from one fixed position the piece really pops to life, but as you move it starts to distort a bit. I hope that pop is exciting.”

 

 

Roelle is indeed a talented artist who succeeds in making exciting work that rewards a close double-take.

 

Learn more at www.cwroelleart.com or by following him on Instagram at @cwroelle.