Donald Roller Wilson

Abstract Surrealist Contemporary Still Life With Wooden Matches

1980

Donald Roller Wilson was born in Houston, Texas in 1938 and was educated at Wichita State University. He is known for using 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. Wilson taught at the University of Arkansas from 1967–74 and lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, with his wife Kathleen, also an artist.

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." 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. Wilson's works can be seen in the Brooklyn Museum; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Whitney Museum; Bank of America in San Francisco, California; Coe Kerr Gallery, New York City; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, as well as many other galleries. The majority of his work is in the hands of private collectors. He created album cover art for musician Frank Zappa during the 1980s and 1990s. Among these: Boulez Conducts Zappa: The Perfect Stranger (1984), Francesco Zappa (1984) and Them Or Us (1984). His main gallery at present is the John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco, and his paintings may be collected through Peter Sahlman in New York.