Bill Wilkinson

Lived a life in landscape

I learned from my father, the caricaturist Wilk, who when I was fairly new in this world made me aware of the power of communicating through drawing. His drawings and paintings reflected his world, his view of it and his involvement in it. His I was born in Keswick Cumbria, studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and taught at Falmouth School of Art, Cornwall.

In 1986 I sailed the Atlantic.

I returned to Cumbria and spent ten years living and working there.

I now live and work in the French Pyrenees close to the Spanish Catalan border and spend the greater part of my time painting – in the mountains, in Corsica and by the sea in Galicia.

Work forms a unique visual record, a local history of the last century. This is the purpose of art – to interpret and explore the interaction of people and place. The idea of addressing each subject with surprise and wonderment and drawing it with all the zest and intensity you can muster as though you would perish the moment you stopped focussing all your attention on it may sound Herculean and evoke Romantic sentiment. But why not be a Hercules?

Drawing and painting are governed by your mental and physical reaction to the situation or place. Painting with watercolour or gouache, like drawing, enables one to put down ideas quickly, and to respond spontaneously to the moment. We spend long uninterrupted days in solitude. The silence enables a discourse between you and the work. It allows you to overlay the work with the internal landscape of the mind, with imagination and memory. It’s not the subject of your drawing or painting that’s important, but how the marks you make describe that subject, the improvisation of patterns, rhythms, shapes and colours. It’s about making your own voyage, solving the problem of describing a landscape without merely reproducing ‘the view’. After all, the world is not just in front of you. It’s all around - below, behind and above you; it's within you.

This means, my response to returning day after day to the same point in a landscape – a beach or headland, a stretch of sand, fell side or river – is to always find it different. Every day brings a new dynamic to the process, just as every high water brings a fresh line of flotsam and jetsam. The mix of colours, shapes and materials is often a surprise but nothing seems out of place. Every work is a new adventure.

‘I have lived my life in landscapes, that other men have owned’

 from Song of the Seven-hearted Boy  by  Federico Garcia Lorca