Pliers and Nails, 1987
Painted Wood, 35" x 10"
Staple Gun, 1989
Hand-Colored Lithograph, 17" x 14"
Paint Brush, 1978
Oil on Canvas, 60" x 60"
Bill Wilson was born in 1931 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and died in 2013. He received a B.A. from the College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia. He attended the Art Students’ League in New York and studied with George Grosz and Reginald Marsh, and then shortly after spent three years traveling in the South Pacific. In 1959 he received an M.F.A. in painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Wilson’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and is included in the collections of the Albany Museum, Albany, New York, the Schenectady Museum, Schenectady, New York, and the Munson-Williams Proctor Institute of Art, Utica, New York. Wilson’s prints and mixed-media works present striking, illusionistic twists on Action Painting and challenge conventional perceptions of mundane objects.
*Excerpted from Tools as Art: the Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc. Edited to reflect the artist’s passing