Eric Wieringa’s current body of work is born out of a professional necessity to simply keep his brush, and skills, moving forward. In that effort Wieringa has found that inanimate, often ephemeral objects provide the opportunity to focus singularly and efficiently, and also experiment freely in his medium of choice, oil paint on panel board. His amassed subjects range from a nostalgic squirt gun, to the rare, hard-earned remaining stub of a Ticonderoga pencil, to a Brook Trout caught in summertime. In response, his audience could argue that “showing an object in isolation brings it significance,” or at least deserves to be considered from a different perspective. Perhaps Wieringa’s biggest take away is that “the irony of painting something as pedestrian as a rusty screwdriver or a used paintbrush underscores an important lesson…that as we work diligently for an imagined outcome, we must not forget to see the beauty of everyday life.”Eric Wieringa earned his undergraduate degree from Indiana Wesleyan University, emphasizing in Painting and Illustration, and continued to get an MFA in Illustration at the University of Hartford, Connecticut. He now lives in Hastings, Michigan.