Wesley Merritt

Wesley Merritt can draw anything except mice. He’s a hybrid of a real Lancastrian upbringing and an imagined life in the American heartlands, and he loves traditional, neo-, postmodern and spaghetti westerns. His work begins in a fairly traditional fashion; line drawing, lots of looking, with lots of digital colour and photocopied magic. Wesley’s work is playful, experimenting with vector, typography and animation as well as line. Wesley had his first exhibition “Going Wrong Ain’t The End Of Things” in Autumn 2014 at The Coningsby Gallery. He was a runner-up in the Folio Prize 2014 for his work on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. He’d really like to do a Folio book, to illustrate A Confederacy of Dunces, and to work on a historical Graphic Novel. Wesley is hugely influenced by David Hockney, Saul Bass, Robert Frank, Sergio Leone, and advertising from the 1960s. He loves Renaissance paintings, Wim Wenders, Bruce Springsteen, mash-ups, Postmodernist ideologies, Penguin’s Great Ideas, Wim Crouwel, Graham Greene, Dadaism, Eric Ravillious and Battersea Power Station. When not required to be visual, he can be found on his bicycle, or swimming in wild places. He has worked for, Publicis, Vodafone, Penguin Books, Random House, Hodder and Stoughton, Harper Collins, The Guardian, GQ, Esquire, New York Magazine, The Daily Telegraph, Jamesons, Remember A Charity, Snickers, Kiehl’s, Wall Street Journal, Canadian Globe + Mail, Bloomberg Media, FIFA, Journal Condé Nast, Men’s Health, Reader’s Digest, Time Magazine, Waitrose Magazine and The Washington Post.