Welles, better known as a collector and connoisseur than as a painter (Mr. Welles was responsible for the Ben Heller collection being shown at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor recently), is exhibiting his paintings as a group for the first time. The work relates to the color ambiences in which a number of East Coast artists in both New York and Washington are involved. Welles’ large brushed images are usually divided by softly painted stripes floating over both the image and the thinly painted ground. The larger works suffer from a certain lack of color resonance that can be attributed to an overly dry application of oil pigment. Dry, thinly applied paint skins are certainly valid when consistent with the idea and object being depicted; Welles’ pictures, however, appear under-worked if only by virtue of their surfaces. The smaller works, on the contrary, are nicely conceived and executed. A possible explanation could be the unprepossessing scale in which the larger pictures were conceived; as yet Mr. Welles has not made an adequate transformation from small to large.
—James Monte
