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Tessa Wessels is a concept artist working from Cape Town. After studying Fine Art at Stellenbosch University, majoring in oil painting, she spent a year becoming more familiar with the digital medium. Since 2018, she has worked in the film industry, creating concepts for environments, VFX, creatures and robots. She has worked with many of the world's biggest production
companies including Warner Bros, Paramount, Sony etc. As a concept artist or designer one creates the look and feel of a film or series, creating paintings and drawings to inform the design of any creature, environment, robots etc. In her spare time she paints concepts and images of her own ideas. 

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'Faces on a Train' 

While still at high school Tessa took the train between False Bay and Newlands (route from home to school) and found herself sketching away on the train, familiar faces, the familiar yet unidentified crowds on the train. She states that every morning meant a new face. These sketches she would do on her train tickets and soon these tickets piled up, she added numbers and symbols and soon she and her friends would play with these at school as playing cards.

These cards were so popular that she extended the idea and used the famous faces of the Italian Mafia to be portrayed on each individual card.

The Tessa Wessels playing card series ( no longer available) , consisted of: A Face on A Train and a face from the Mafia. Each series featured all 54 playing cards in the deck. From the original sketched train ticket playing cards, digital prints were made which were available as packs of cards or 30x18cm individual card prints. The individual prints consist of a limited number of 52 prints per card.

The prints 'Faces on a Train', and "Mafia' are available at Artvark Gallery. 

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Artist Statement:

Painting is personal. My love of painting rests on my arcane and jubilant sentiments that the paint substance, with its marks and colours, has a secret life of its own. This is plagued by a cutting suspicion that an attempted mark of honest self-expression turns to farce as soon as it hits the paper. My themes differ, with allusions to physical power and authoritative embodiment while my painting itself is an attempt at something- at this age, I feel that I am not supposed to know. For me, painting gives a momentary satisfaction in its paint and the subsequent realization that it lacks that satisfaction.