Our frequent arts contributor and artist herself Grace Graupe-Pillard is making studio calls. This week she shares with us her visit to the studio of the artist June Wilson whose love affair with nature since her childhood days deeply informs her artistic practice.

June Wilson is constantly observing nature with its wavering light and moods, creating paintings that are often minimal in form, but maximal in richness of content. She uncovers hidden secrets buried under layers of veiled diaphanous curtains of paint, revealing glimpses of the mysteries of germinating life. Wilson is sensitive to the natural world; her awareness of our interdependence in the cycle of life is transformed into oil/alkyd on birch plywood paintings and shapes derived from personal examination and time spent on the river kayaking with her beloved golden retriever.  For example, in Sniff Sniff’s (2004) looming outline of the dog’s nostrils or in Common Flicker (2004) we see an artwork that gives us a sense of the rhythmic beat of a woodpecker heard in the backyard. Her most recent series focuses on insect pollinators and their importance to the ecosystem.

June Wilson, Sniff Sniff (left), 38” x 45”, oil/acrylic on wood, 2004. Common Flicker (right), 20.5” x 21”, oil/acrylic on wood, 2004. Courtesy of the artist.

Wilson was brought up in rural New Jersey where she and her sister roamed the woods exploring all matter of vegetation, scrutinizing the cylindrical beauty of nature’s design in wasps nests, jack in the pulpit wildflowers, and the myriad configurations of leaves and barks they came across while wandering under the protective canopy of the trees. They poked about the streams filled with snakes and  tadpoles and flittering silvery fish while the sounds of birds in the distance communicated like far off whispers. The poetic magic and complex beauty of Wilson’s natural surroundings have always been a determining component of her art.

In the 1990s, Wilson worked with six-sided birch wood shapes making all the sides equal. She then decided, she says, “ to make the shapes uneven…more like nature that is fracturing and breaking.” She begins with a gestural brush mark on the wood, then pours translucent oil paint  and alkyd medium onto the panel letting it drip and run, creating a laminate of “skins” that often allows the original grain of the wood to be visible. What we perceive through this process is the manipulation of the earth’s strata, alluding to change — those fleeting moments of chance vs. control. These paintings exude light with surfaces that are as seductive and delicate as a hummingbird’s wing grazing your arm. Initially, all we see is the abstraction of form and color, but soon we recognize that the work exudes a narrative — one that reaches deep into her personal history.