David Wilson is included in the Caldbeck’s curated show, WILD THING in September/October 2025. WILD THING 2025
Born in Scotland in 1953, Wilson is known for his non-representational, yet familiar landscapes, which contend with history, half remembered dreams, and the natural world. Wilson’s evocative paintings challenge the viewers to consider the nuances and shifting perspectives just below the surfaces of his work. He credits his drive to become a painter to the artists in his family. Alexander Stewart, his great-grandfather, ran away from home and worked as an itinerant house painter before attending the Edinburgh School of Art. His grandfather, Ian Stewart, worked as an artist and etcher and was one of the founders of Scottish Studios and Engravers in Glasgow Scotland. This history informs Wilson’s work today. Critic Richard Martin writes that “Wilson’s paintings have a like quality of seeming resemblance, of suggesting places of sites seen, and yet never being quite capable of being pinned down geographically. But they are enthralling, for we are certain that we have seen them before and the invention of the artist is as personal as a recollection or a family album.”
Wilson attended life drawing classes at Glasgow School of Art before enrolling at St. Martin’s School of Art in London, studying with Gillian Ayres and John Hoyland. A teaching assistantship allowed him to continue his studies at the School of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University, where he earned his MFA.
Influence on Wilson include illuminated manuscripts, Mughal painting, and the all-seeing eye of Surrealism. The work of painters William Blake, Casper David Friedrich, Charles Burchfield, and Marsden Hartley inform his work, as well as the memories of his native Scotland and the landscape of his current home along the craggy coast of Maine. For the past thirty years, Wilson worked primarily on small pieces, paintings no much larger than postcards. An epiphany occurred while painting a stage set and his most recent works have grown considerably in scale, perhaps to encompass the expansive Maine landscape and unseen lands beyond.
