Description

Title: Sunset Swim

Blues are an anomaly in Wilson’s oeuvre, but this composition invites you to dive into a cerulean sea at sunset—an offer you might find too hard to refuse. As always, the figurative beginnings of the painting are apparent in its form and content. But this figure is not fixed in an interior scene; rather, it is free—adrift, bath pictorially and compositionally—wild swimming among the craggy rock formations and the cartographical lines characteristic of Wilson’s work.

This is one of a series produced during the global pandemic. With lockdown, Wilson continued to draw from life—albeit virtually—with All The Young Nudes, a Scotland-based online life drawing collective. The intimate yet exuberant pieces that resulted from these sessions seem to express that familiar paradox we all experienced during the pandemic: gratitude for the opportunities that technology yields, but at the same time a deep yearning for human connection.