Benton

"Jeff is a funny guy. In many ways. He is an obsessive maker of lists. He enjoys the offbeat, the "bizarre", the fantastic. You might say he's obsessed with the concept of obsession. His world-view filters into the art, the paintings, he creates - those colors and images. He still owns an actual record player and loves the records that he collects. He has a way with the empty canvas - there is no fear of color. Color is everywhere - a thing that has spilled out from a mind consumed by the land of dreams. And there is humor and word-play and an actual playful sincerity that creeps up on you and takes control of your senses while you stand there in the presence of one of his creations: A world is in the process of unfolding, creating itself inside your head, behind your eyes. You can feel his enjoyment as he shapes this spastic world of ours into some place else that we can still identify with. This enjoyment of the process is the basis of what is great about his images. He takes it to the limit, and beauty is the result."

2011

Diers

"Jeff's earnest pursuit of the most universal human themes — love, death, religion — is buoyed by the peculiar warmth and imaginative flourish of his own singular perspective. Even in its darkest corners, his work seems better suited to communion and conversation than to solitary introspection. The scenes and figures he creates are ready to be met on anyone's terms, so long as the viewer can join Jeff in defying the inertia of his or her most self-conscious preoccupations. A one-armed drummer girl, a faceless priest, a scythe-wielding bunny rabbit with a cheap pun for a name ... this array of characters and cracked archetypes can ring a variety of bells, from the nostalgic to the flatly provocative. Individually, their visages might seem borrowed from a tattered children's storybook, an austere portrait gallery or an indelibly awkward dream you'd been content to forget. Collectively, they disperse their emotional weight across a wide and sometimes unpredictable landscape. Anchoring all of it is Jeff's unabashed devotion to the humor, sadness, irony, restlessness and surreal margins of his own experience on our increasingly crowded planet."

2011

Freeman

"I never have any trouble identifying Weispfenning’s work no matter what part of his career it came from. His paintings romp in the magical side of experience whether they deal with the marvelous or the macabre. His paintings have a lightness of representation, no matter their subject matter, that willfully sends his work adrift into the dreamlike and the mystical and invites his viewers to contemplate their own sense of the wondrous. Weispfenning’s use of color accentuates the impossible and allows his paintings to dance in the borderlands between the conscious and the unconscious. His liquid use of paint and color heightens our sense of imagination and attunes us to a world of possibilities and fluid boundaries. His painterly avenue of discovery has developed overtime and his later work is not only testament to his growing skill as a painter but as an artist who can grasp the totality of his work."

"A student of theory, of history, and of culture, Jeff hits upon a complexity of meaning in his work that gives an edge to the dreamscape of his color palette. Jeff’s subject matter brings us to the epistemological divide between the world we live in and the world we think we live in, and leaves us with the conundrum of which is more real: perception or reality. In fact, it is his play with the psychology of subjectivity that makes his work as challenging as it is. It doesn’t matter upon which of his troupe of clowns, demons, cross dressers, juveniles, terrorists, seductresses, or innocents you fix your gaze, your identification of these archetypes as archetypes is only made possible by virtue of their shared cultural currency. Thus, Jeff’s work confronts our common psychological constructions of reality rather than reality itself."

"This kind of play between the viewer, artist and his work creates an active engagement with his audience that is not easy to ignore, and his work elicits pointed comments from seasoned art lovers and neophytes alike. You see, Jeff’s work facilitates dialogue and begs for viewers to see his work in relation to themselves rather than in relation to the artist. Now that’s not to say that the engagement will be easy, in fact some of Weispfenning’s depictions of the taboo can be downright unnerving, but the beauty of it is that it is always our assumptions and expectations that created the taboo in the first place. This is a fact that you might well ponder as you gaze upon the masterfully rendered life-sized canvas of the artist in drag as he looks at you."

2011