26 Facts About John Wilde

John Wilde was a painter, draughtsman and printmaker of fantastic imagery.

John Wilde was associated with the Magic Realism movement and Surrealism in the United States.

The youngest of three boys born to Emil and Mathilda Wilde, John Henry Wilde was born near Milwaukee, Wisconsin on December 12,1919.

John Wilde returned to the home of his youth in Madison, where he lived with his parents for the next twenty years, setting up his art studio in the attic of their house.

John Wilde met and married fellow art student Helen Ashman in 1942.

John Wilde taught his students how to make their own inks, chalks and crayons from materials found in nature, how to craft reed and quill pens and how to prepare grounds for metal point drawing, including silver point, the medium in which Wilde became a modern master.

John Wilde took Watrous's lessons to heart, poring over recipes for oil mediums and eventually formulating a secret mixture for use in his own work.

John Wilde received his bachelor of science degree in 1942 and was drafted into the US Army shortly thereafter.

John Wilde served with the Infantry Air Force and the Office of Strategic Services.

In spite of his deepening depression, John Wilde saw broader artistic possibilities in some of his journal sketches, working them up into larger drawings that he mailed to Dudley Huppler in Wisconsin.

John Wilde's thesis was ostensibly about the Surrealist artist Max Ernst, but Wilde later admitted that the thesis was a statement of protest against Abstract Expressionism.

John Wilde did have a deep interest in and empathy for nature and its cycle of generation, growth, decay and death.

And, more than all, he always returned to the human form, whether invoking the whimsy of surreal situations or regaling in the complex and graceful discipline of fine anatomical drawing, of which John Wilde is virtually nonpareil in his century.

The art historical painting and drawing techniques that John Wilde learned in James Watrous's seminars give his work the look of something from fifteenth century Italy, and is further reflected in his lifelong admiration for the drawing discipline behind the works of North European Renaissance artists.

Frequently John Wilde paints himself into a scene, as if to acknowledge that this is a world where he confronts his own fears and desires.

John Wilde now holds no drawing board, nor sighting tool, but is just looking and pointing with his back turned toward us.

In keeping with his historical orientation in teaching, John Wilde painted homages to favorite artists from the past in his last couple decades, especially in the middle eighties; artists such as Piero di Cosimo, particularly his "Perseus Rescuing Andromeda," and works of the Englishman Richard Dadd, Aachen-born Alfred Rethal and other Germans Otto Runge, Otto Dix, and Max Ernst, Switzerland's Arnold Bocklin, and friends Julia Thecla and Gertrude Abercrombie.

However, he did no teaching, other than rare class visits to his studio, and John Wilde held silent disdain for both Bohrod and Curry, believing the intensity of his surreal world more vital than their more straightforward simplicity, and the craft of his drawing discipline more demanding than theirs.

John Wilde designed the exhibition poster based on a silver point in which he depicted each participant as an apple-head emerging like a herd from the horizon with himself in the back; suitably so the apples, as apples recur consistently as life-affirming in Wilde's work through the years.

John Wilde produced around 20 oils based on Hamady's personal journals from the mid eighties, 12 of which are reproduced in the 1992 publication "Nineteen Eighty-five: The Twelve Months," mentioned above.

John Wilde collaborated with Harvey Littleton and Littleton Studios to create three vitreograph prints.

John Wilde collaborated with Colescott on designing the state poster for the Wisconsin Sesquicentennial in 1998.

John Wilde was elected to the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences and Letters in 1982 and to the National Academy of Design in New York City in 1993.

John Wilde was honored as the Alfred Sessler Distinguished Professor of Art, University of Wisconsin Art Department.

John Wilde's artwork is in the collections of museums throughout the United States, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

John Wilde lived in or near Evansville and Cooksville, Rock County, Wisconsin most of his adult life.