Artful Find of Simplicity in Complexity

Middletown artist June Wilson’s abstract paintings look like simple, graceful forms, but they are deceptive. They belie the complex process that it takes to achieve that look.

Her process is multilayered and intuitive. The first layer is the support. Instead of canvas, she uses birch-faced plywood that has been cut into the geometric shapes that become the ground for her current abstracts.

The shapes are worked out on paper before she gives them to a carpenter to cut for her. While that is being done, she is busy conceptualizing the design which is often based on something in nature, like the bees in her Bee Thorax series.

Once she has the design worked out on paper, she uses acrylics to create the shapes that become the base for layers and layers of oil paint that she builds up until the painting vibrates with energy and luminosity.

Painting glaze over glaze, she builds up the color, creating depth and luminosity while allowing the wood grain to show through. In many of her works there are gestural marks, long and short stokes of paint usually in the shape of a wave or a spiral.

She has learned over the years to use a transparent white paint that can be mixed with color without turning chalky. “That’s important when you are layering,” she said. “Once I’m satisfied that I have achieved what I envisioned, I apply liquin, an oil paint medium that adds a shine and a hard surface.”

Wilson lives in a contemporary style house off Kings Highway with her husband Sam Annitto. Her studio is on the first floor, just as you walk in the door. “This would have been the living room,” she said, “but we have another room that serves as the living room.”

A Middletown resident since 1985, Wilson said she started painting abstracts on a geometric ground in the 1990s, after spending many years as a realist, honing her originality and sense of drama and design in mixed media pieces.

Her early portraits of famous people are not just paintings; they are sculptural iconic pieces surrounded by symbols of the person’s claim to fame embedded in the frames or the piece itself. There are about 14 pieces in the series, including one of the French 1920s and 30s singer Edith Piaf.

In the early 1980s she painted ordinary people doing ordinary things. “I began drawing with colored pencils and a crayon called Caran D’ache," Wilson said. "I used friends who posed for me doing everyday things like listening to a Walkman or talking on the phone. Today, of course, it would be an iPod or a cell phone."

Wilson’s first abstract was a large, rectangular canvas with a deer antler floating over a dark blue-black background. The whole piece was done with oil sticks that she pressed very hard on so that each stroke created a hard edge giving the monochromatic background texture.

Calling it a transition piece, she said, "Doing the piece with an oil stick freed me up to move toward abstraction after so many years of realism. A path opened for me and I took it."

A seasoned artist and art teacher, she believes that abstracting from nature is so much closer to her personality than realism or portraiture. “It is more physical and I’m a physical person," Wilson said. "I take palates, yoga and have been kayaking for the past 10 years.”

She added that while she is kayaking in a quiet place she often thinks about her latest motif for a painting series: "Painting in series is important for an artist and galleries like to see that you have been exploring an idea, or concept."

Her wave series is about exploring the action and energy of movement and the sense of movement in painting. And her Bee Thorax series is about studying bees and their complex bodies and lives. “My father was a beekeeper," she explained. "He had all of the equipment; you know the hood and everything. I spent my childhood around bees."

She noted that when the bees come back to the hive they dance in a certain pattern that follows the sun. “That’s how they get the other bees to follow them," she said.

She is one year into this series, but it is tough because some of the things that she has tried haven’t worked. “I’m just beginning to apply the washes," Wilson said. "Once I finish these smaller ones, I will make a large piece. I want to experiment with a lighter weight wood so that it won’t be so heavy and I can float it away from the wall.

"An artist always has to ask the question, 'Does it work?' Not every canvas is going to be successful. There are always the failures.  But that’s part of the process.”

Some artists do not like to name their works, but Wilson does. Her names become one with the piece — evocative or whimsical, like "Common Flicker" and “Pollen Hunter." 

The name “Drunken Sailor" came about because there was a flaw in the wood. "I named it that because there were four little knots in the wood," she explained. "I was upset at first, but then I decided to work with them. Now, they remind me of the eyes of a drunken sailor darting about."

As an artist, originality is critical to Wilson."To be a professional artist, you have to make choices," she said. "One of the choices that an artist makes is whether to please people or be original and hopefully make a change in our history. I fight with myself all of the time. It was easier to get recognition when I was doing representational work.  Now, it’s often like I am performing without a net.

"Picasso said some artists make cakes, the same cakes over and over. What he meant was creativity is not a hobby.”

Wilson has been exhibiting since the 1970s, and has shown her paintings in galleries and museums in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Texas. Her work is included in many corporate, museum, and private collections.

In 2000, Wilson installed a public art project for New Jersey Transit's Hudson Bergen Light Rail System. She designed the tortoise and hare weathervanes at the Exchange Place Station in Jersey City. She has been granted painting fellowships from The New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper.

In May 2010, she was part of an exhibition at the NJ State Museum in Trenton, entitled Reality and Artifice where she showed her latest abstracts. And in March of 2009, she had a one-person show called Tasting Shape at the Brodsky Gallery, Educational Testing Service, Princeton.

She has been painting for a very long time now and has accumulated work in almost every room of her house. “You become a curator of your own work,” she said.

She explained that when she had a retrospective at the Middletown Township Public Library last year she had to pull together pieces from every style period of her life. Some of them had to be refurbished. The retrospective show entitled “Flashback” spanned the years between 1977-1984. “There was a lot of work in that show. It depicted my evolution.”

Wilson has been teaching at Ocean County College for the past 34 years. An adjunct, assistant professor, she teaches painting and often shows her work to her students. “It’s interesting how each decade the students work changes," she said. "It is now more influenced by technology. It’s harder for them to focus on just looking. Art teaches them to focus. Who knows how technology will change the future."

But, she said, she tells them that they have to develop dedication and love of the process. “Don’t do it if you don’t need to do it,” she tells them.

Wilson said she realized that she had to create art after trying to develop as an actor. “My first love was theater, but eventually I realized that art was something that I always came back to from forays into other worlds. Knowledge of the world informs my work,” she said.

She was also influenced by a childhood surrounded by nature, alive and dead. The men in her family were hunters and there were often dead animals hanging up for her to examine. In addition, she said, the building across the street was a taxidermy shop. 

Most recently, she has become interested in curves. Her newest series consists of more rounded shapes. The angles are gone completely. One, called the "Death of Nature," is reminiscent of the feathers of a bird on a golden honey colored background. Another called the Monarch’s Tongue, has a spiral shape like a butterfly’s tongue.

One of the more practical lessons that she likes to impart to her students, one that was not taught to her in art school, is how to market your work. She tells them that it is important to work in series because it shows that you are studying a certain theme. “Style is important, personal voice is important, what you have to say is important," she said. "Galleries like to be able to recognize an artist work. They like to be able to say that’s a Monet, or a Pollack.”

 Or for that matter, a June Wilson.