BIOGRAPHY

Michael B. Wilson

BIOGRAPHY

THE EARLY YEARS

I was born in Berthoud, Colorado halfway between Denver and Cheyenne in 1955, the same year that Disneyland opened and UFO’s were first reported in Roswell, New Mexico. To the east of our small farming town was flatland prairie for a thousand miles, while five miles to the west the foothills began their ascent to the Continental Divide. We were over a mile above sea level and in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains.

I can see now that we were living on a cusp geographically and in a culture that, similar for generations, was about to erupt into the turbulent change of the 1960's and 70's. That environment of life on the point of transition has been the dominating influence in my life and my work.

MY FAMILY

The women on my mother’s side have lived within a ten-mile radius of my hometown in rural Colorado for four generations. The men in my family tend toward the peripatetic. My grandfather on my mother’s side hitch-hiked out of Iowa as a teen, ending up in Colorado as a mountain-tour bus-driver before he met my grandmother and eventually begat my mother. My father left his family in Kansas by the same method, and after serving in the Korean War made his way to Colorado where he met my mother and settled near her family. My grandparents lived a block away so I grew up with my grandfather as one of my best friends.

I subsequently left there the first time when I was seventeen. I stuck my thumb out and took to the highway as my forbearers had done, casting fate to the wind, confident in the generosity and the kindness of strangers, and causing my mother to worry just as her forbearers had done. This “American Odyssey,” three generations of American men traveling across the country, has become the basis of much of my current paintings concerning trains and trucks.

EDUCATION

In high school I studied the first six lessons of The Famous Artists Course by Mail. Their faculty taught the basics of picture-making as learnable skills, and I still refer to many of those lessons as the foundations of my art making. I learned to practice a variety and efficiency of mark-making, employing effects of lighting, texture and composition, using the Old Masters’ work as examples.

I was hooked on art as my career and my life’s quest. It being an illustrator’s course, all of the techniques were taught to be used in the service of story-telling. It would be years before I was introduced to the idea that marks could be used for their own sake.

I entered college at 21, surviving the disco and punk years as a hippie in northern California. At Humboldt State University I studied printmaking, sculpture, drawing and history. I never received a degree at HSU, as my only concern was making a living as an artist. A degree meant nothing to me at the time. It was in those years that I tried my best to assimilate and incorporate the lessons of the past 2500 years of art, seeking my place in it. Experimentation and discovery dominated my processes. The artists that had the biggest impact on me were my colleagues, as many out of school as in it, seeking truth in art with the energy and passion of our age. The artists I saw in galleries and museums that changed me the most were the Fontainebleu School, Degas, Van Gogh, Monet, Picasso, Matisse, Duchamp, Dada, Surrealism and Magritte, Motherwell, but especially Rauschenberg and Johns. Years later, the list has expanded to include Guston, Diebenkorn, Ben Schonzeit, and David Salle.

Leaving California behind in 1983 I spent a year of solo journeying through Europe, lived on the Greek island of Paros for a year, several more months in West Berlin and NYC, and into and out of the Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts. In 1988 I finished the Museum School with a studio diploma and $7000 award for a shared first place in the Museum School’s Fifth Year Competition. I used the money to establish myself a working studio in the suburban mill town of Waltham, Massachusetts.

AFTER SCHOOL

It was at about this time that the lessons and experimentation of the previous ten years started to gel.

In 1990 I attended the Millay Colony in Austerlitz, NY, the first of five artist’s colonies I’ve been accepted at. By then I could see that my art-making came and went in cycles over a span of several years at a time, each cycle exploring the same sets of concerns, including sculpture. Beginning with figures and working through realism via landscapes and still-lifes into abstraction I’d end up back with figures, beginning the cycle again.

The combination of realism and abstraction and the layering of contrasting elements was always the apex of the cycle. Followed by deconstructing the complexities in order to simplify and re-explore the elements I was most interested in I’d then re-construct the layered pieces the next time around. Each time I switched from realism to abstraction and back again I felt it was necessary for the advancement of my understanding of how to make art. The cycles continue to expand with every revolution, encompassing new experience, information and ideas and jettisoning the tried but untrue.

CURRENT CONCERNS

One outcome of my decades-long search is the ability to paint in a variety of styles, and to realize what style or method is most effective for what I want to convey and which imagery can convey multiple meanings simultaneously. For instance a ripe cherry by itself speaks not only as an organic red shape but also as Transient Beauty, defying gravity. A scratched and splattered area of paint without an object creates tone in both mood and value, signifying a range from springtime bright to stormy darks.

The layers of opposing elements act as planes of reality or perception, and the combination of realties happening at once, sometimes flowing, sometimes colliding into each other, is how I perceive life to be. Rough/smooth, near/far, male/female, geometric/abstract, movement/stillness, emotion/reason, are manipulated to create and maintain a gentle tension between what we assume to know and what we are looking at. Our perception of things changes as the environment changes from what is expected.

That changes the meanings of things, engaging and provoking the viewer into a participating role. By triggering their natural instinct to fill in what appear to be gaps in the narrative with their own stories, the cycle of art is completed, from artist’s conception to interaction with an audience.

The paintings of trains are, in part a tribute to the strength and poetry of the machinery of the “Golden Age” of trains in the US. The imposing power of these “Monsters of Industry and Modernity” continues to rumble through our cultural identity, delivering not only goods and passengers, but also folk songs, stories and literature, and iconic imagery. This is the stuff of modern-day mythology, which is what I try to present in these paintings. Through powerful movement came the possibilities, the promises and the hopes for better places and better lives. In that way the train becomes a metaphor for the artist’s life. They also represent the era of my grandfather in the “American Odyssey” project I mentioned earlier.

EMPLOYMENT

I have always worked to support my art habit, primarily restaurant and construction jobs. Even for the year I spent in Greece I worked as an illegal immigrant, keeping myself in rent, food and paints. I currently own a business building stretcher bars, crates and pedestals for artists. I have taught classes in painting and drawing and for 5 years after the Museum School I was shop manager for “Draw the Line Productions,” building props and displays for trade shows and advertising, as well as architectural models. That job, which ended in 1995, was the last time I worked for anyone other than myself as an artist. During the heyday of the late 1990’s economy I supported myself well through the sales of my paintings, mainly through Fresh Paint Art Advisors in Los Angeles, up until the dot-com crash of 2000. Since then I continue to sell, but not with the abandon of those heady days.

In 2003 Rosemary Broton Boyle, also an artist and my significant other for many years, and I opened the OZ Gallery, a seasonal gallery in Provincetown, MA. We primarily have shown our own work, as well as a few friends we believed in, and African masks and artifacts. A decline in tourism spending has followed us throughout this endeavor and in spite of a loyal following and praise from our peers this past summer may well have been our last.

I am in the process of applying for grant funding through the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Artists Foundation and Creative Capital Foundation.

CONCLUSION

I believe that what matters above all is to paint what you want to paint with every bit of integrity that you have. You can figure out later what it means and why it might be worth pursuing. The moment of creation is not the time to understand everything you do but to tap into the subconscious, and what you instinctively want is the quickest way to your true self. As part of making a living I do commissioned paintings as much as I can, and I know the difference between hiring out to meet someone else’s vision and

following your own instincts in pursuit of a personal vision whatever it may be.

One reason for making art is so we can define our relationship to the world and the universe. Trying to understand what the universe means by drawing pictures of how the world looks is what artists do. The mystery of that, the sheer un-attainability of trying to catch something as ephemeral as the meaning of our lives in this universe, yet so concrete and changeable as the meaning of our lives in this world inspires me. That such a need is what drives us to make art leads me to the conclusion that this is as noble a quest as one could hope for.

Michael B. Wilson