Wade began painting as an undergraduate student at UCI (Irvine) in the 1990s, where he gravitated towards painting and photography as primary mediums, while studying under Tony DeLap, Craig Kaufman, and John Paul Jones, among others. Wade’s abstract work is a reflective response to the world around him, drawing inspiration from the field paintings of many of the 20th/21st abstract expressionists (Mark Rothko, Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, and Gerhard Richter to name a few). Wade describes his connection to abstract expressionism as “the beautiful interplay of line, color, form, weight and composition create a wordless dialog that I find fascinatingly profound and deeply moving.” Wade’s photographic work provides much of the basis for his compositional framing, and he often incorporates abstracted photographic elements into 2D painted constructions to create added contextual dialog.
