| When Jackson Pollock said, "I
am nature," he seemed to be proclaiming himself, at least from the usual inflection
it is given, an elemental force. It was, in a way, a declaration of independence
from traditional ways of thinking about the subjects of art; about figures and
still lifes and landscapes. In a sense, Wilson's paintings are curiously inverted
expressions of that dictum, inverted because they both are nature and they are
about nature. She knows that what is out there is infinitely changeable and that
the painting process itself proves that there is a continuous connection, through
her eyes and mind and what she has learned to do with her hand, between what
is out there and what is in her. Every gesture of the brush is like a gust of
wind, every infusion of color like an increase or decrease in moisture that affects
the brightness and color of light.
Except for the fact that you sense all the layers that have
preceded the last one, you don't really know what is underneath. You do know
from experience that what is there now evolved from something else, and that
there are several patterns containing millions of possibilities: blues, yellows,
reds, oranges, purples, grays, wispy shapes, turbulent, curvilinear shapes, mottled
patterns, etc. The great yellow swath of Eventide spreads upward and outward
in a way that balances the light blue sky and the dark blue horizon, but it also
seems to obey its meteorological destiny. The quilted clouds of Whirlwind
spiral toward the light in the upper half like a migrating flock of birds, paying
attention to some secret geometry, just like the painter herself.
Donald Goddard © 2003
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