Jesse Waugh
1974– · American artist working in painting, film, writing and music
Jesse Waugh (born in Berkeley, California, on 6 May 1974) is an American artist who works across painting, film, writing and music. His work has appeared on television and in other media, and his short film El Angel was screened at the Fifth LA Freewaves Festival, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles in 1997.
In the early 1990s he studied at several colleges in Los Angeles, Pasadena and San Francisco. After graduating from San Francisco State University in 2000, he spent some time in Europe before returning to the United States. His practice mixes media freely. El Angel, shot in the style of an old silent film, traces the birth, peak and death of Los Angeles and reflects on how greed corrupts art and commerce.
Waugh describes his painting with the term "pulchrism", which he defines as an art theory that treats beauty as the purpose of art. He presents it in contrast to Stuckism and to the celebration of ugliness that he argues took hold in modernism. Some of his paintings have served as a book cover, and his films and images have been used in educational projects and documentaries.