After graduation, Wetzel enrolled in SAIC in fall 1961, where he studied with Vera Berdich,[9] Whitney Halstead,[10] Thomas Kapsalis,[11] and Sonia Sheridan.
The gallery was located up the street from the Mole Hole, home of the counterculture newspaper the Chicago Seed, and walking distance from Cabrini Green, a low-income, high-rise complex known for high poverty and crime.
[4][16][17] According to Robin Dluzen, the Imagists were “mainly white but with an unusually large percentage of female members … 7 women amongst 11 men …”[18] These events were organized by Don Baum, exhibitions director at HPAC, and a participant in one of the nine shows.
[19][20][21] James Yood offered a concise definition of the Imagist aesthetic: … funky and irreverent subject matter (often with sexual and/or violent overtones, with imaginative fantasies dealing with the figure under extreme physical or psychological stress), a predilection for narrative themes drawn from vernacular sources, a decided openness to influences from self-taught artists and from sources outside the mainstream of Western art history, a taste for garish and obsessively busy small-scale compositions driven by a concern for symmetry and a linear approach to the figure, surrealistic whimsy and ironic and caustic humor undercutting the “serious” status of the art object, high-keyed color, scrupulous and fastidious craftspersonship [sic] tending toward the suppression of evidence of the experiential residue of the artist's hand, and iconic independence and idiosyncratic mannerism of the most manic sort.
They cluster in small groups and—rather like the secret kids' clubs that flourished in the days of radio serials and the Sunday funnies—they even assume corporate names, like The Hairy Who ([Jim] Nutt, [Gladys] Nilsson, [Karl] Wirsum, Suellen Rocca, Art Green, James Falconer), The Nonplussed Some ([Ed] Flood, [Ed] Paschke, Sara Canright, Richard Wetzel, Don Baum), the False Image (Roger Brown, Phil Hanson, Christina Ramberg, Eleanor Dube).
Alan Artner, Chicago Tribune art critic, commented on the 2000 Imagist show at the Chicago Cultural Center: Some artists in “Jumpin' Backflash”—Robert Guinan, Richard Wetzel—didn't fit the developing definitions of the style and were passed by almost from the beginning … … That few of the painters beyond Ed Paschke and Jim Nutt ever took their art further perhaps says something about Imagism and arrested development.
The groups miscegenated briskly in a series of Hyde Park shows that, with themes and costumes, were also theatrical events: “Marriage Chicago Style,” for instance, solemnized the joining of members of the Who and the Some, plus Barbara Rossi.
[22] Wetzel was quoted in the program notes for Jumpin' Backflash: … the current exhibit is the first time that ALL the “Imagist” artists have been included, in person or in print … it should present a rare opportunity to read the works instead of the words.
Whitney Halstead, Artforum, 1968 The juxtapositions typical of collage are blended to achieve a lyrical (and here, dreamlike) mood in Richard Wetzel's transfer images on glass.
Just as vegetable claws resemble beatle [sic] and crab pincers in Wetzel's drawings, so flying seeds acquire monarch-butterfly and other insect wings.
[30] Sue Taylor, Chicago Sun-Times, 1985 … the brilliant radiating colors and mysterious, iconic images that have long distinguished Wetzel's art are still his major concerns.
Each image is set against a monochromatic background of the deepest blue, purple or green, which may be read as an infinite spatial recession, indicative of the vague realm of imagination.
[25]Sue Taylor, Chicago Sun-Times, 1985 What is unique about his current paintings is their powerfully emotive quality, for they operate largely on the level of feeling.
Both in spirit and execution, it implies affinities with such German expressionists as Georg Grosz, but for Wetzel, allied with the “Nonplussed Some,” Vietnam, not Dachau, more likely supplied the inspirational matrix.