- Donald Roller Wilson
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Donald Roller Wilson (born November 23, 1938) is an artist who uses some unique items in his paintings, such as dogs and cats, chimpanzees, dill pickles, wooden matches, olives, asparagus stalks, and even cigarettes. He paints in oils in very polished realism using the same techniques of the Old Masters.
He was born in Houston, Texas and is based in Fayetteville, Arkansas. According to the New York Times, "Donald Roller Wilson's goofy, hallucinogenic, Old Master-style painting of monkeys, dogs and cats dressed up in antique costumes may be kitsch, but it's high-quality kitsch, like good beach reading."[1]
Some of the characters he has created include Cookie the Baby Orangutan, Jane the Pug Girl, Jack the Jack Russell “Terror,” Loretta the Actress Cat, Miss Dog America, and Patricia the Seeing Eye Dog of Houston.
He was educated at Wichita State University.
His many works hang in the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York; Chicago Art Institute, Chicago, Illinois; Whitney Museum, New York, New York; Bank of America, San Francisco, California; Coe Kerr Gallery, New York City; and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
Also, notably, he was Frank Zappa's visual coordinator during the 1980s and 1990s. He produced the cover art for Boulez Conducts Zappa: The Perfect Stranger (1984), Francesco Zappa (1984) and Them Or Us (1984).[2]
He taught at the University of Arkansas between 1967 - 74[3] and lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas with his wife Kathleen, also an artist. His main galleries at present are the John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco, the Meyer Gallery in Santa Fe, and his paintings may be collected through Peter Sahlman in New York.
Selected solo exhibitions
- 1998 Donald Roller Wilson: One Man Show, Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, KS
- 1997 Donald Roller Wilson: Paintings, Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA
- 1989 Donald Roller Wilson, The Huntsville Museum of Art, Huntsville, AL
- 1988 Roller: The Paintings of Donald Roller Wilson, Organized and toured by Mid-America Art Alliance, Kansas City, MO; traveled to: Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, AR; The Fine Art Center, Nashville, TN; Oklahoma Art Center, Oklahoma City, OK; Huntsville Museum of Art, Huntsville, AL; Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, TX
- 1974 The Paintings of Donald Roller Wilson (catalogue), La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, CA
- 1970 Donald Roller Wilson, Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, MO
- 1970 Donald Roller Wilson, The City Arts Museum of St. Louis, St. Louis, MO
- 1969 Donald Roller Wilson, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX
- 1966 Donald Roller Wilson, Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, KS
References
- ^ http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9902EFDC143BF93BA25755C0A96F958260 New York Times, June 18, 1999.
- ^ Neil Slaven, Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa, Omnibus Press, 2003, p332. ISBN 0711994366
- ^ Artnet
External links
Categories:- Artists from Arkansas
- University of Arkansas people
- American artists
- Living people
- 1938 births
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