Robert Wesley Wilson, by Walter Medeiros
Robert Wesley Wilson came late to art, and through a side door. Before that he was a student of philosophy and religion, which was also unlikely. By his own account, except for schoolwork, he had done very little reading before age eighteen.
Wilson was born in 1937, in Sacramento, California. The family lived near Placerville, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. During his early childhood his parents separated, and he lived with his mother, a school teacher whose employment ranged across Northern California, from the Sierra foothills to the Salinas Valley. In these rural agricultural regions Wilson became an active, outdoor boy. He found his best friends among the more rustic boys, especially those whose families had recently migrated from Oklahoma, Arkansas and various Southern states. He suffered little parental restraint during these years, and enjoyed long hours of enthusiastic play — an experience of freedom he regards as highly valuable, essential to his creative spirit.
Wilson spent his teen-age years in various Sierra foothill towns, including Auburn, where he completed high school. Though he eagerly absorbed liberal concepts of philosophy and religion from an elder brother, the rural schools taught no more than the “three Rs.” And as an active teen-ager his focus remained external. He didn’t realize there were books on these subjects until after graduation — then he became a voracious reader.
Also after high school, he began serving his military obligation (begun at age sixteen, during the Korean war era), which included six months active duty in the Army. Intent on an education, he later attended junior colleges (part time) in Auburn and Sacramento for four years, while supporting himself with odd jobs. His elective courses were in philosophy.
Wilson did have an interest technical things; he was attracted to the high-tech ideas and illustrations in the Popular Mechanics magazines of the 1940s and 50s, and had taken mechanical and architectural drawing classes in high school. In 1959 he obtained a summer job in an architect’s office in San Francisco. With a taste of the City, as well as the expansive prospects of education, Wilson embarked on a mature path. In the fall of 1960 he returned and enrolled at San Francisco State College. During that time he also met and married his first wife.
Other vocations had attracted him: aeronautical engineering, architecture, and forestry. But most compelling was the desire to know, to understand the concepts, the systems of thought and belief that had engaged thinkers and shaped the cultures of the world. He was especially interested in Eastern religions and philosophy, and took courses in Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as Christianity and the Western philosophers. He also read the works of contemporary teachers and commentators, such as Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki, and attended lectures at the Vedanta Society, then one of the few sources of East Indian metaphysical teachings and practice in the nation.
In the spring of 1963, after completing his junior year, Wilson had to drop out of college. Unfortunate, but he hadn’t planned on an academic career, and he felt satisfied that he had attained the core of knowledge he sought. By this time he had three daughters, and he now had to work full time to support his family. Later that year Wilson and his wife separated, and eventually they divorced.
Having left college without a vocational direction, Wilson gave serious consideration to his future. Encouraged by his educational achievement, and greater self-knowledge, he followed a latent creative impulse, and determined to become an artist. This wasn’t a rash decision; he had been drawing intermittently since childhood, and more regularly since 1961. Wilson was primarily self-taught; his formal instruction consisted of once-a-week night classes during two three-month courses, in Painting and Life Drawing, at the San Francisco Academy of Art in 1964.
In late 1960, shortly after arriving in San Francisco, Wilson moved into the Wentley, a low-rent apartment building at the edge of the Tenderloin district. Its inhabitants ranged from the straight to the unsavory, sometimes including artists of the Beat Era, both the famous and the local supporting cast. The Wentley, and Foster’s, the all-night coffee shop below, were places where connections were made. Through a Wentley tenant, Wilson met Bob Carr.
Carr was a contemporary of the Beat Generation, but of different sensibilities. He had studied psychology, Eastern philosophies and disciplines, and altered states of consciousness. In the mid-1950s he had been a co-founder of one of the earliest “human potential” institutes, The Center for Integration, in Seattle. In 1956, in association with psychologists he obtained Sandoz LSD, which was used in research on educational programs for personal growth. By 1960 he came to reject the role of teacher-leader and the prospect of establishing another system of disciplines. He closed the Center and moved to San Francisco.
From a latent interest and a bit of practice in art and graphics, Carr decided to take up the printer’s trade. He got a job with a commercial printing company and within a couple of years he had become the manager of a modest-sized shop. Following another interest, he obtained audio-visual equipment and, with his partner, began creating engrossing, mind-altering slide programs. These programs included sound tracks, some of which included recordings he made of local jazz musicians.
Carr’s apartment was one of those little cultural centers that develop around sociable, creative people, and he was pleased to entertain friends such as Wilson and his fiancé Eva, a student of ballet. Wilson had impressed Carr — as a person and, upon seeing some of his drawings, also as an artist. He believed that psychedelic experience would further open Wilson to his artistic potential, and at his suggestion Wilson took his first acid trip in the supportive environment of Carr’s apartment.
As their friendship matured, Carr invited Wilson to be his associate in the venture of starting a printing shop. While still intent upon art, at this time Wilson had been considering architecture as a livelihood, but lacked funds for the necessary training. Carr’s proposal offered the opportunity to develop skills in graphic art and learn the printer’s trade, and he readily accepted.
In the spring of 1964 Contact Printing Company opened in the basement below Carr’s apartment. Wilson learned the basics of graphic layout and camera work, and did a lot of free-hand lettering. Most of their work was done on a couple of small presses, and in black or a single color. It was a low-budget operation, and most of their jobs were mundane — business forms and stationery, flyers for grocery stores’ special sales, etc. But Carr’s contacts with various elements of San Francisco’s active underground art community occasionally brought in more interesting work. They printed programs for a San Francisco film festival and, through Stewart Brand, for the influential Trips Festival. They also printed promotional material for the politically radical Mime Troupe (whose business manager was Bill Graham), and a macrobiotic diet book, “Zen Cookery.”
Wilson was mainly unaware of the rock music scene that had been developing in San Francisco during 1965. In the fall he learned a bit about the local scene when a friend of Carr’s showed them the handbill for the first Family Dog dance, on October sixteenth. As it happened, in the fall of that year Wilson created two graphic art works that brought him notice among the emerging counter culture.
Wilson was very aware of the social and political events of the early 1960s. Alarmed by illegal FBI wiretaps on civil rights leaders and the escalating military activity in Vietnam, in late 1965 he designed a full-color poster that warned of America adopting the policies of a dictatorship. He had also designed his wedding invitation. Both of these distinctive graphic works impressed Chet Helms, who was then the manager of an emerging rock band an active promoter of the counter culture scene.
Helms contacted Wilson and had him produce a couple of music handbills, and also design an invitation for his own wedding, in December. Contact Printing also produced the program and flyers for the January 1966 Trips Festival, an event which confirmed the large demand for psychedelic rock dances. In February Bill Graham (at the Fillmore Auditorium) and Chet Helms (at the Avalon Ballroom) began producing regular weekend dance-concerts, and both turned to Wilson to design their posters. Contact Printing printed a few of the first posters for each dance hall, then closed down in early 1966. Bob Carr went to India, and Wilson, now a free-lance artist, went on to fame as a prominent creator of the psychedelic poster art.
Wilson is a traditional artist, drawing has always been his basic medium. This inherent mode was reinforced and influenced through contact with Rick Barton, a Beat Generation artist who frequented Foster’s coffee shop, and others of Barton’s artistic circle. These older artists were part of a diverse set of local mavericks whose primary artistic subject was people. As a matter of distinguishing them from the reigning, avant-garde style of Abstract Expressionism, this group of “new realists” came to be called the Bay Area Figurative school. Wilson is also of that school.
During the 1960s commercial artists designed the posters of the business world, usually through ad agencies. Stylistically, posters of that Late Modern era were generally simple and neat. They were composed of a few basic elements — image and lettering — on a plain background, and they were produced by the most modern technical methods of the graphic industry. Socially and esthetically, the counter culture was the antithesis of 1960s mainstream sensibilities. Like the music, the poster art was an underground, minimal budget, do-it-yourself affair. It was usually made at home or, later, in cluttered, informal studios. The first San Francisco rock poster designers were amateurs. Hand-made art — drawing — was the only option.
Wilson learned poster design on the job, and he took full advantage of circumstances that permitted unusual artistic freedom, starting with the mind-set and visual experience of his counter culture audience. For the Avalon posters Wilson pasted in and worked around the images provided by Helms, but he preferred to draw everything. While perhaps not the quickest way to produce the work, for him it was the surest way to create a work of art. He constantly experimented with design, form and color in attempt to energize the poster, to make it dynamic, expressive of the high-energy, high-spirited dance hall environment created by the music, the light show and the throng of dancers.
As to imagery, the human figure– primarily female– is prominent in his poster art. Often in association with various symbols, these figures express the philosophical and metaphysical consciousness of the artist and the counter culture. Wilson’s thoughtful treatment of Woman — the evocation of intellectual and spiritual depth, as well as wholesome sensuality — is unique. It is perhaps the most serious, positive portrayal of the feminine image in the Modern era, and a foreshadowing of the current celebration of goddesses in feminist and spiritual circles.
Through his unique lettering method and his “fill-the-sheet” approach to design, within six months, especially in his Fillmore designs, Wilson developed a distinctive graphic style. Its basis is a blocky, mutable “font,” which was used in dense “blocks” of text that could be warped into sculptural form. This style became — and remains — iconic, emblematic of 1960s “turned on” graphics. In 2005 this signature style was used for the title of a major exhibition of psychedelic art at the Tate Liverpool Museum.
During the first five months of the psychedelic dance craze Wilson designed the posters for both the Avalon and the Fillmore ballrooms. Eventually, the pressure of designing two posters a week became excessive, and he had to make a decision. Helms took an active role in the design of his Avalon posters, which Wilson felt as a creative constraint. He decided to quit the Avalon and stay with Graham, who was not inclined or qualified to be an active art director. Graham had his own busy schedule and, unlike Helms, he had no personal experience with graphic art, nor with the extensive roots of counter culture sensibilities and creative expression.
Wilson generally ignored the basic rules of poster design — simplicity and maximum readability — and created works of art related to counter cultural sensibilities and sometimes his personal experiences. Often there was a very short lead time, three to four days, for the design and printing of the posters. He delivered his art work directly to the printer; Graham only rarely saw the design before it was printed. Wilson simply asserted the authority of art and by default was granted an extraordinary degree of artistic freedom. Such freedom became the norm of the San Francisco rock poster movement.
Wilson produced all but a few of the Fillmore posters until May, 1967, when the meager payment and a royalty dispute with Graham led him to quit. While the dispute provoked it, Wilson had also grown discontent with producing art work related to a product. He always considered himself an artist; despite his success, and the exceptional artistic freedom he enjoyed, he was never entirely satisfied in the role of commercial artist.
In the summer of 1967 the First Five artists were featured in a Joint Show at a San Francisco art gallery. There Wilson met an official of the National Endowment for the Arts. During their conversation Wilson suggested that it might be better for Art if the agency provided more support to creative living artists, rather than funding traveling shows of deceased old masters, with their customary expensive champagne opening parties for socialites.
Later that year the Wilson family (they had an infant son) moved to their second rented house in Marin County, but in early 1968 they were bumped out so the owner could move in. By this time the Wilsons had moved so often that they decided to begin looking for a house to buy. Though there was little money on hand they had faith that they could manage it somehow. Fortunately, just then Wilson received a pleasant surprise in his mail box — a $5000 award from the National Endowment, unsolicited, for his “contributions to American Art.” Some of this windfall went for the purchase of an old house in Lagunitas, a small town in the wooded hills of West Marin. In 1969 their daughter was born.
After settling in Wilson began painting in watercolor. People remain his primary subject, generally in an informal setting. Visiting friends may be casually sketched while in conversation, or perhaps sunbathing in the yard.
During that time Wilson also began working in the medium of colored glass, and the style, especially the color effects of these two media were related. His painting technique, an overlaying of color washes, was developed from his recognition and appreciation of the translucent qualities inherent in artworks of glass. His concept wasn’t based on the usual method of “stained glass,” of different colors joined with lead, but in a unique “enameled glass ” method of his own. With this method softer forms and fluid, “washes” of color could be achieved. The method consists of finely ground colored glass powders (in a “slip,” similar to pottery) applied on a sheet of glass and fused, like a glaze, in a kiln. It is a painterly method; lines and color hues can be created by applying and fusing — one at a time — two or three color overlays. It was a complicated, technical, time-consuming process, and a delicate one. Basically, it involved masking and sandblasting the design on the base sheet of glass, making the colored glass for the slips, building the kiln and controlling temperatures during the fusing process, and also the cooling. Wilson eventually produced about a dozen pieces, some of which were used as windows.
By nature Wilson is not a city dweller, nor would just a house in the country do; since a young man he had always wanted to settle down on a piece of farm land. He feels that work on the land provides a grounding, a necessary balance, especially for the conceptual and visual mind-set of his artistic vocation. By 1976 he knew it was time, and began actively searching for a suitable property. Land in California was too expensive; research of national real estate listings eventually led him to a 135 acre farm in southwestern Missouri, among low rolling hills of the Ozarks. In late 1976, just before moving in, their second son was born.
Wilson has a small beef cattle farm, and over the years he has devoted much effort to improving the property. He has nurtured native prairie grasses that are ideal cattle forage, and has adopted other organic methods for improving the soil and the hay crop.
The nurturing of his environment goes beyond agronomy, that is, he extends such land management principles to include visual and spatial esthetics, such as tree locations and shapes. He thinks of his property not only as a farm, but a “farmscape.” There is now an apple grove next to the old house, which has been partially remodeled. More recently he transformed the barn into a spacious painting studio, where he now spends as much time as possible.
Walter Medeiros 2005
Wilson was born in 1937, in Sacramento, California. The family lived near Placerville, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. During his early childhood his parents separated, and he lived with his mother, a school teacher whose employment ranged across Northern California, from the Sierra foothills to the Salinas Valley. In these rural agricultural regions Wilson became an active, outdoor boy. He found his best friends among the more rustic boys, especially those whose families had recently migrated from Oklahoma, Arkansas and various Southern states. He suffered little parental restraint during these years, and enjoyed long hours of enthusiastic play — an experience of freedom he regards as highly valuable, essential to his creative spirit.
Wilson spent his teen-age years in various Sierra foothill towns, including Auburn, where he completed high school. Though he eagerly absorbed liberal concepts of philosophy and religion from an elder brother, the rural schools taught no more than the “three Rs.” And as an active teen-ager his focus remained external. He didn’t realize there were books on these subjects until after graduation — then he became a voracious reader.
Also after high school, he began serving his military obligation (begun at age sixteen, during the Korean war era), which included six months active duty in the Army. Intent on an education, he later attended junior colleges (part time) in Auburn and Sacramento for four years, while supporting himself with odd jobs. His elective courses were in philosophy.
Wilson did have an interest technical things; he was attracted to the high-tech ideas and illustrations in the Popular Mechanics magazines of the 1940s and 50s, and had taken mechanical and architectural drawing classes in high school. In 1959 he obtained a summer job in an architect’s office in San Francisco. With a taste of the City, as well as the expansive prospects of education, Wilson embarked on a mature path. In the fall of 1960 he returned and enrolled at San Francisco State College. During that time he also met and married his first wife.
Other vocations had attracted him: aeronautical engineering, architecture, and forestry. But most compelling was the desire to know, to understand the concepts, the systems of thought and belief that had engaged thinkers and shaped the cultures of the world. He was especially interested in Eastern religions and philosophy, and took courses in Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as Christianity and the Western philosophers. He also read the works of contemporary teachers and commentators, such as Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki, and attended lectures at the Vedanta Society, then one of the few sources of East Indian metaphysical teachings and practice in the nation.
In the spring of 1963, after completing his junior year, Wilson had to drop out of college. Unfortunate, but he hadn’t planned on an academic career, and he felt satisfied that he had attained the core of knowledge he sought. By this time he had three daughters, and he now had to work full time to support his family. Later that year Wilson and his wife separated, and eventually they divorced.
Having left college without a vocational direction, Wilson gave serious consideration to his future. Encouraged by his educational achievement, and greater self-knowledge, he followed a latent creative impulse, and determined to become an artist. This wasn’t a rash decision; he had been drawing intermittently since childhood, and more regularly since 1961. Wilson was primarily self-taught; his formal instruction consisted of once-a-week night classes during two three-month courses, in Painting and Life Drawing, at the San Francisco Academy of Art in 1964.
In late 1960, shortly after arriving in San Francisco, Wilson moved into the Wentley, a low-rent apartment building at the edge of the Tenderloin district. Its inhabitants ranged from the straight to the unsavory, sometimes including artists of the Beat Era, both the famous and the local supporting cast. The Wentley, and Foster’s, the all-night coffee shop below, were places where connections were made. Through a Wentley tenant, Wilson met Bob Carr.
Carr was a contemporary of the Beat Generation, but of different sensibilities. He had studied psychology, Eastern philosophies and disciplines, and altered states of consciousness. In the mid-1950s he had been a co-founder of one of the earliest “human potential” institutes, The Center for Integration, in Seattle. In 1956, in association with psychologists he obtained Sandoz LSD, which was used in research on educational programs for personal growth. By 1960 he came to reject the role of teacher-leader and the prospect of establishing another system of disciplines. He closed the Center and moved to San Francisco.
From a latent interest and a bit of practice in art and graphics, Carr decided to take up the printer’s trade. He got a job with a commercial printing company and within a couple of years he had become the manager of a modest-sized shop. Following another interest, he obtained audio-visual equipment and, with his partner, began creating engrossing, mind-altering slide programs. These programs included sound tracks, some of which included recordings he made of local jazz musicians.
Carr’s apartment was one of those little cultural centers that develop around sociable, creative people, and he was pleased to entertain friends such as Wilson and his fiancé Eva, a student of ballet. Wilson had impressed Carr — as a person and, upon seeing some of his drawings, also as an artist. He believed that psychedelic experience would further open Wilson to his artistic potential, and at his suggestion Wilson took his first acid trip in the supportive environment of Carr’s apartment.
As their friendship matured, Carr invited Wilson to be his associate in the venture of starting a printing shop. While still intent upon art, at this time Wilson had been considering architecture as a livelihood, but lacked funds for the necessary training. Carr’s proposal offered the opportunity to develop skills in graphic art and learn the printer’s trade, and he readily accepted.
In the spring of 1964 Contact Printing Company opened in the basement below Carr’s apartment. Wilson learned the basics of graphic layout and camera work, and did a lot of free-hand lettering. Most of their work was done on a couple of small presses, and in black or a single color. It was a low-budget operation, and most of their jobs were mundane — business forms and stationery, flyers for grocery stores’ special sales, etc. But Carr’s contacts with various elements of San Francisco’s active underground art community occasionally brought in more interesting work. They printed programs for a San Francisco film festival and, through Stewart Brand, for the influential Trips Festival. They also printed promotional material for the politically radical Mime Troupe (whose business manager was Bill Graham), and a macrobiotic diet book, “Zen Cookery.”
Wilson was mainly unaware of the rock music scene that had been developing in San Francisco during 1965. In the fall he learned a bit about the local scene when a friend of Carr’s showed them the handbill for the first Family Dog dance, on October sixteenth. As it happened, in the fall of that year Wilson created two graphic art works that brought him notice among the emerging counter culture.
Wilson was very aware of the social and political events of the early 1960s. Alarmed by illegal FBI wiretaps on civil rights leaders and the escalating military activity in Vietnam, in late 1965 he designed a full-color poster that warned of America adopting the policies of a dictatorship. He had also designed his wedding invitation. Both of these distinctive graphic works impressed Chet Helms, who was then the manager of an emerging rock band an active promoter of the counter culture scene.
Helms contacted Wilson and had him produce a couple of music handbills, and also design an invitation for his own wedding, in December. Contact Printing also produced the program and flyers for the January 1966 Trips Festival, an event which confirmed the large demand for psychedelic rock dances. In February Bill Graham (at the Fillmore Auditorium) and Chet Helms (at the Avalon Ballroom) began producing regular weekend dance-concerts, and both turned to Wilson to design their posters. Contact Printing printed a few of the first posters for each dance hall, then closed down in early 1966. Bob Carr went to India, and Wilson, now a free-lance artist, went on to fame as a prominent creator of the psychedelic poster art.
Wilson is a traditional artist, drawing has always been his basic medium. This inherent mode was reinforced and influenced through contact with Rick Barton, a Beat Generation artist who frequented Foster’s coffee shop, and others of Barton’s artistic circle. These older artists were part of a diverse set of local mavericks whose primary artistic subject was people. As a matter of distinguishing them from the reigning, avant-garde style of Abstract Expressionism, this group of “new realists” came to be called the Bay Area Figurative school. Wilson is also of that school.
During the 1960s commercial artists designed the posters of the business world, usually through ad agencies. Stylistically, posters of that Late Modern era were generally simple and neat. They were composed of a few basic elements — image and lettering — on a plain background, and they were produced by the most modern technical methods of the graphic industry. Socially and esthetically, the counter culture was the antithesis of 1960s mainstream sensibilities. Like the music, the poster art was an underground, minimal budget, do-it-yourself affair. It was usually made at home or, later, in cluttered, informal studios. The first San Francisco rock poster designers were amateurs. Hand-made art — drawing — was the only option.
Wilson learned poster design on the job, and he took full advantage of circumstances that permitted unusual artistic freedom, starting with the mind-set and visual experience of his counter culture audience. For the Avalon posters Wilson pasted in and worked around the images provided by Helms, but he preferred to draw everything. While perhaps not the quickest way to produce the work, for him it was the surest way to create a work of art. He constantly experimented with design, form and color in attempt to energize the poster, to make it dynamic, expressive of the high-energy, high-spirited dance hall environment created by the music, the light show and the throng of dancers.
As to imagery, the human figure– primarily female– is prominent in his poster art. Often in association with various symbols, these figures express the philosophical and metaphysical consciousness of the artist and the counter culture. Wilson’s thoughtful treatment of Woman — the evocation of intellectual and spiritual depth, as well as wholesome sensuality — is unique. It is perhaps the most serious, positive portrayal of the feminine image in the Modern era, and a foreshadowing of the current celebration of goddesses in feminist and spiritual circles.
Through his unique lettering method and his “fill-the-sheet” approach to design, within six months, especially in his Fillmore designs, Wilson developed a distinctive graphic style. Its basis is a blocky, mutable “font,” which was used in dense “blocks” of text that could be warped into sculptural form. This style became — and remains — iconic, emblematic of 1960s “turned on” graphics. In 2005 this signature style was used for the title of a major exhibition of psychedelic art at the Tate Liverpool Museum.
During the first five months of the psychedelic dance craze Wilson designed the posters for both the Avalon and the Fillmore ballrooms. Eventually, the pressure of designing two posters a week became excessive, and he had to make a decision. Helms took an active role in the design of his Avalon posters, which Wilson felt as a creative constraint. He decided to quit the Avalon and stay with Graham, who was not inclined or qualified to be an active art director. Graham had his own busy schedule and, unlike Helms, he had no personal experience with graphic art, nor with the extensive roots of counter culture sensibilities and creative expression.
Wilson generally ignored the basic rules of poster design — simplicity and maximum readability — and created works of art related to counter cultural sensibilities and sometimes his personal experiences. Often there was a very short lead time, three to four days, for the design and printing of the posters. He delivered his art work directly to the printer; Graham only rarely saw the design before it was printed. Wilson simply asserted the authority of art and by default was granted an extraordinary degree of artistic freedom. Such freedom became the norm of the San Francisco rock poster movement.
Wilson produced all but a few of the Fillmore posters until May, 1967, when the meager payment and a royalty dispute with Graham led him to quit. While the dispute provoked it, Wilson had also grown discontent with producing art work related to a product. He always considered himself an artist; despite his success, and the exceptional artistic freedom he enjoyed, he was never entirely satisfied in the role of commercial artist.
In the summer of 1967 the First Five artists were featured in a Joint Show at a San Francisco art gallery. There Wilson met an official of the National Endowment for the Arts. During their conversation Wilson suggested that it might be better for Art if the agency provided more support to creative living artists, rather than funding traveling shows of deceased old masters, with their customary expensive champagne opening parties for socialites.
Later that year the Wilson family (they had an infant son) moved to their second rented house in Marin County, but in early 1968 they were bumped out so the owner could move in. By this time the Wilsons had moved so often that they decided to begin looking for a house to buy. Though there was little money on hand they had faith that they could manage it somehow. Fortunately, just then Wilson received a pleasant surprise in his mail box — a $5000 award from the National Endowment, unsolicited, for his “contributions to American Art.” Some of this windfall went for the purchase of an old house in Lagunitas, a small town in the wooded hills of West Marin. In 1969 their daughter was born.
After settling in Wilson began painting in watercolor. People remain his primary subject, generally in an informal setting. Visiting friends may be casually sketched while in conversation, or perhaps sunbathing in the yard.
During that time Wilson also began working in the medium of colored glass, and the style, especially the color effects of these two media were related. His painting technique, an overlaying of color washes, was developed from his recognition and appreciation of the translucent qualities inherent in artworks of glass. His concept wasn’t based on the usual method of “stained glass,” of different colors joined with lead, but in a unique “enameled glass ” method of his own. With this method softer forms and fluid, “washes” of color could be achieved. The method consists of finely ground colored glass powders (in a “slip,” similar to pottery) applied on a sheet of glass and fused, like a glaze, in a kiln. It is a painterly method; lines and color hues can be created by applying and fusing — one at a time — two or three color overlays. It was a complicated, technical, time-consuming process, and a delicate one. Basically, it involved masking and sandblasting the design on the base sheet of glass, making the colored glass for the slips, building the kiln and controlling temperatures during the fusing process, and also the cooling. Wilson eventually produced about a dozen pieces, some of which were used as windows.
By nature Wilson is not a city dweller, nor would just a house in the country do; since a young man he had always wanted to settle down on a piece of farm land. He feels that work on the land provides a grounding, a necessary balance, especially for the conceptual and visual mind-set of his artistic vocation. By 1976 he knew it was time, and began actively searching for a suitable property. Land in California was too expensive; research of national real estate listings eventually led him to a 135 acre farm in southwestern Missouri, among low rolling hills of the Ozarks. In late 1976, just before moving in, their second son was born.
Wilson has a small beef cattle farm, and over the years he has devoted much effort to improving the property. He has nurtured native prairie grasses that are ideal cattle forage, and has adopted other organic methods for improving the soil and the hay crop.
The nurturing of his environment goes beyond agronomy, that is, he extends such land management principles to include visual and spatial esthetics, such as tree locations and shapes. He thinks of his property not only as a farm, but a “farmscape.” There is now an apple grove next to the old house, which has been partially remodeled. More recently he transformed the barn into a spacious painting studio, where he now spends as much time as possible.
Walter Medeiros 2005
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