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John Wilde was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1919. As a child he had a deep, instinctive love of drawing, but his parents discouraged his art-making. He liked to draw battle scenes, airplanes, and “imaginary cities, which (he) then erased and re-created.” He believed most of his early art was thrown out. Luckily, when Wilde began high school, some of his teachers recognized his talent and encouraged his drawing. Art classes were the only ones he enjoyed. Like so many artists, Wilde had difficulty making it through high school. Still, he loved to read, and a book that influenced him greatly was The Charter House Of Parma by Stendhal. He enjoyed the field trips his class went on to the studios of WPA artists Santos Zingale and Alfred Sessler, where he saw for the first time that art could be a serious profession. He started entering art shows and spent time with his mother’s cousin, the famous local artist Gustave Moeller. Wilde’s brother Leslie was friends with another local artist, Paul Clemens, who Wilde became something of an apprentice to. He swept the studio, mixed paint and gessoed panels. Clemens would regularly have drawing classes with a live model—Wilde and others would pay a dime for three hours of instruction.
Wilde blossomed intellectually and artistically when he entered University Of Wisconsin- Madison in 1938 to study art and art history. He had wanted to attend school in Chicago, but his parents didn’t want him to leave Wisconsin. They were unhappy enough that he was studying something as frivolous as art! He traveled often to Chicago and Milwaukee and got to know many artists there. This Madison/Milwaukee/Chicago gang, which included Julia Thecla, John Pratt, Charles Sebree and Gertrude Abercrombie influenced him even more than university. The professor he was most drawn to was James Watrous. His classes in renaissance techniques and personal encouragement effected Wilde deeply. In 1942 he was drafted into the army, but didn't go overseas. While in the military he carried Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey To The End Of Night and The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek. He designed camouflage, made maps and propaganda drawings for army Intelligence (for the venereal disease prevention program). He wasn’t thrilled about being in the military and later said, “How war can be sanctioned by the government and approved by the public is just beyond my grasp.” Being in the army took time away from his art, but he was able to produce several drawings of smiling women with strange wounds or growths. He enjoyed adding script to his drawings. The text would ramble on in a stream-of-consciousness until it eventually inspired a different drawing. Even at this young age, Wilde had remarkable skill, which of course improved with experience. Interestingly, his style, technique and philosophy changed very little throughout his life. In 1943 he married fellow art student Helen Ashman and they had two children, Jonathan and Phoebe. Helen died in 1966 and in 1971, Wilde married Shirley Grilley.
When the war ended, Wilde returned to Madison to attend graduate school. After getting his degree, and with a family to support, he began teaching art at the university. Meanwhile, he kept making his own surreal and personal work. He dressed formally for classes, in a suit and tie, but would wear “artist’s clothes” when working in his studio. He did many self-portraits (mostly drawings) and placed himself in several of his paintings, sometimes slyly in the background. He said,“To me, there is very little difference between being in the painting and the act of painting—it’s the same thing. It’s impossible to separate myself from the things I am doing, and, therefore,very often, I include myself.” The surreal works helped him examine his inner thoughts; it was a kind of self-analysis. His subject matter was often strange and dream-like, but drawn or painted realistically. James Watrous’ lessons about renaissance technique stayed with Wilde. He used and honed them throughout his career, enjoying the preparatory process as much as making the art itself. He made many paintings, but his true love was always drawing. His favorite method was silverpoint, a technique in which he used a fine-pointed tool to scratch prepared paper or panel. The images are ghostly and fine, difficult to see in photos.
Wilde drew objects that had great significance to him. He gardened, and many of his paintings are still lifes of the fruits and vegetables he grew. He said painting and gardening were alike: “both areas resist sham, oddness and are receptive of long evolution, love and devotion.” He lived a conventional life in the rural area outside of Madison. He didn’t like traveling, except for the rambles he took in the countryside. He loved to draw and paint things he saw or found on walks: birds, rabbits, chipmunks, nests, cocoons, grasshoppers, cicadas, animal skulls, plants and leaves. He also often put guns, daggers and small fish in his pictures. For him, drawing or painting an object was a way of worshipping it. He said still lifes had to have some spooky element that made them more than an illustration. He would change or heighten the color, or he’d play with the sizes of things by juxtaposing a giant bird next to a tiny woman. He taught at the university and pottered around his house, but looking more closely at his art, one sees that he was “on the edge of shrieking with horror and vomiting (his) spleen.” His painting Wildeworld from the fifties shows the jagged rent that exists between reality and the artist’s inner world. Wildeworld Revisited from 1995 is more disturbing; an apocalyptic vision of an orange vortex sucking away not only reality, but the fantasy world as well.
Like many artists, Wilde did not like talking about the meaning of his work. He felt art had to have a deep significance to the artist for it to be good. In spite of the fact that he taught drawing, he admitted that he believed the true essence of art could not be taught. You can teach someone technique, but not the indefinable quality that truly makes something art. He said, “To rediscover the old art-truth is as inevitable as it is impossible, that is to say, it is found in spite of and because of self, or it is not found at all. It cannot be made to happen. It happens because of intense selfless work, through time, skepticism, love, awe and single-mindedness, if at all.”
Wilde liked old art best. He used techniques to make his own art look old. He loved many renaissance artists like Albrecht Dürer, Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel. He liked making small, detailed paintings that people had to get up close to see. He also loved Paul Klee and Max Ernst. He was out of touch with the art of his time and didn’t care. Wilde was uninterested in fame. He ignored trends and wasn’t particularly aggressive about galleries and competitions. “I am outside of art. I know what is ‘going on,’ but only intuitively, for I have little contact with it. I know, in fact, that 94%, more or less, of the Au Current (sic) is nonsense... Equally, I am certain that what will happen today, if anything happens, will happen in isolation...Art comes from lonely men, cooking in their own juices, but physically able and driven to state their madness.”
Wilde made art about nature, society and the strange world inside his head. He painted parades of naked women marching through small, empty Wisconsin towns, towering kohlrabi plants next to tiny men, a house full of “happy, crazy, American animals and a man and a lady at my place.” He died in 2006, age 87. He lived a quiet life teaching, taking long walks, pottering in his garden and forever dreaming, reading, thinking and drawing. There was no fame or fortune, but there was the incredible joy and delight of cooking in his own juices and stating his madness.
©2017 Alice DuBois
- "Wildeworld: The Art Of John Wilde" Organized By Russell Panczenko, Hudson Hills Press, New York 1999
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilde
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