Originally from West Palm Beach, Florida, Wilcox earned a BFA in Painting with high honors from the University of Florida, where he also received the Presidential Award for Excellence in the Arts. Wilcox’s work has shown in California, New York, Florida, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and has appeared in publications such as The LA Times, Juxtapoz, Coagula Art Journal and Flaunt Magazine.
“Merging classical technique with modern perception, Wilcox’s work is a commentary on a society clasping to garish distractions as a means of escaping the inevitable downfall. His art stands as a moral critique of a world attempting to shroud itself in beauty and diversion in the midst of its own collapse.
His intention is for the work to have a preternatural effect on the viewer; evoking at times a sense of awe, terror, insignificance, romantic sensuality, allusions to our self destructive nature, the temporal nature of beauty and life, and the decay of the material world as a constant of which we are always aware.”
JUXTAPOZ, magazine
Wilcox’s haunting paintings of young blond girls and landscapes of beauty and impeding disaster are seeped in symbolic context. Warm umbers accentuated with subtle flesh tones are achieved through a series of burnishing and glazing techniques, giving the work a shadowy depth seldom seen since the Illuminists of the 1800’s.
While Wilcox’s paintings reference the highly romanticized past of previous centuries, his constructions evoke religious iconography dating back to the beginning of mankind’s search for salvation. A carved wooden altarpiece of Noah’s Ark includes sea dragons and black birds circling its gothic spires. The back room of the exhibition is transformed into a snowy winter’s day, with a full-size wagon carrying a simple wooden coffin.
The artist explains, “My work is a moral critique of a world attempting to shroud itself in beauty and diversion in the midst of its own collapse. My intention is for the work to have a preternatural effect on the viewer; evoking at times a sense of awe, terror, insignificance, romantic sensuality, allusions to our self-destructive nature, the temporal nature of beauty and life, and the decay of the material world as a constant of which we are always aware.”
“These are imagined histories; a place where simplicity and an almost primitive nature converse with one¹s soul; a place where dreams open out onto a landscape of the unconsciousness drawing a well of emotions so often suppressed in the confusion of the present to otherwise not be experienced. To loose oneself in a painting is to arrest time itself.”
Edward Walton Wilcox, January 2009
More information about Edward Walton Wilcox’s current works, including additional information about ways in which to contact him directly or where his work is currently being exhibited, please visit his website at www.edwardwaltonwilcox.com.
>Information for this description was taken directly from the content provided the Merry Karnowsky Gallery write-up and from Edward Walton Wilcox’s website.<
