Tasting Shape – The Artwork of June Wilson from Grace Graupe Pillard on Vimeo.

Wilson’s father kept bees in the backyard of their home. She remembers the mysterious outfit he wore, the vision of bees alighting and moving up and down his arm, which marked the beginning of her enchantment with bees and the realization of their critical influence on the environment. She was particularly interested in the bees’ method of communicating the location of a food source in their hive through a “waggle” dance. In 2010, Wilson began The Bee Thorax Series,  an ongoing body of work utilizing a cutout wooden outline of the bee’s thorax — the top half of a bee’s back. As the “engine of the bee,”  this thorax shape became the artworks’ basic form, resembling an armored shield, a reminder of how this species is both warrior and defender of an ecologically indispensable system.

June Wilson, Zippity Doo Dah, oil on wood, 30″ x 26″, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

Zippity Doo Dah (2011) and Milk And Honey (2009) incorporate the curling dance compositions of bees moving through the whitish milk thistle. In Pollen Sac (2012), Wilson depicts two interacting shapes, referencing how bees collect pollen onto their legs — like “saddle bags” — to bring back to the nest. She has rendered the act with the utmost simplicity that belies the vital intricacy of these “baskets” in the pollination of flowering plants and crops. It’s Gonna Rain (2015), a fuzzy white ball of dandelion seeds morphs into clouds, pierced by a disembodied antenna, the deepening blue sky threatening rain — an element essential to life. Blown Away (2016) places the viewer in the midst of milkweed seeds, erupting out of a plant being dispersed by the wind and ready to attract bees and the Monarch butterfly, which is facing extinction. Green rivulets and waves in the painting reiterate the haunting mystery of propagation.

Wilson painted Midnight At The Oasis (2015),  incorporating an exquisitely rendered pheasant’s tail into her burgeoning cosmos of marks and drips. The contrasting elegance of this beautifully illuminated image with the golden background reminded Wilson  of “…a hive of swirling  bees…” hovering in a universe of volatility.  In Leaving The Host (2016), Wilson delineates barnacles, which are crustaceans growing on other substrates feeding through feather-like appendages with tongues combing the water for microscopic organisms. Wilson paints them in clusters, having been “shed” from its circular blue host. They are free floating and evolving, like the artist herself.

June Wilson, “Leaving the Host,” 48” x 43”, oil on wood, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.