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Gualala Arts
Promoting public interest and participation in the arts since 1961.
Local ArtistKeith Wilson - Watercolor
The result of this graphic exploration is a body of several thousand paintings and drawings, in which memory of historic form, fantasies of buildings that might be, and studies for commissioned works are all intermixed.
The artist's purpose in limiting his painted works to such an intimate scale is to invite close scrutiny, limit distractions, and intensify involvement of the viewer's imagination with the work. Recently Wilson has introduced abstract landscape paintings to his artistic oeuvre. The loosely painted sumi-ink / watercolor sketches are an immediate and pre-conceptual communication with observed and remembered natural formations and phenomena. The study of Chinese landscape paintings, Taoist writings and subsequent travel in China, Kauai and the Sierra Nevada mountains provide a continual source of inspiration. He is currently working on an extended series of "Meadow Studies" inspired by his meadow at Sea Ranch. In addition to the original paintings, the artist has been producing signed limited edition prints of the watercolors from his private collection. The printing method employed has a very high resolution which successfully replicates the brilliance and transparent qualities of the original watercolor paintings using permanent, non-fading ink on 100% rag Somerset watercolor paper.
Keith Wilson was born in 1954 in Redding, California and has lived in the Bay Area since 1972 . He has traveled extensively in Britain, Europe, Japan , China, Chile and Tunisia with his camera and sketchbook. He has a studio in Berkeley and one at 118 Horizon Reach, The Sea Ranch.
© copyright 2009 - all rights to the images are retained by the artists |
Keith Wilson's paintings are icons; they are dedicated to an architecture
that is no longer conceived or constructed. They also represent his
continuous study of architectural form and the history of the place of buildings in paintings. In his work he uses building structures and details in meaningful juxtaposition, allowing classical elements and vernacular constructions to have their own way, proliferating variations. His color is similarly the product of memory and imagination, inspired by the painted buildings he has seen in Italy and Greece.
This fusion of personal vision, fantasy and play, with the serious study of architecture is more than an artist's personal vocabulary. It is also the expression of a designer's effort to resurrect a spirit of mischievousness and invention long out of favor in the architectural profession.
