Wilt Painting

My watercolor paintings combine still life with narrative elements, often involving themes of confinement or looming disaster. They are mock elegies that rely on word play, dark humor, and the intrinsic beauty of their subjects to relieve the tension of unexpected encounters and of contrived existential dramas. My interest is in "delicate subjects," a term meant not just literally but also figuratively, as in, for example, a contemplation of the fragility of life, or of the inevitability of darkness -- ideas we avoid confronting on a more than occasional basis. My goal is to evoke an atmosphere of disquiet and a sense that the answers to our most urgent questions might be hidden in plain sight and yet remain unreachable. When I was young, I lived in a wildlife sanctuary amidst thousands of acres of dense forest, where I spent countless hours drawing birds and other wildlife. Our only neighbor down the road was an Audubon Society museum, whose director let me take some of their mounted bird specimens outside to photograph in lifelike arrangements with my instamatic camera. The melodramatic look of those staged setups stayed with me, and when I started making watercolors twelve years ago, I tried to recapture the mood of those photos. My paintings today depict staged dramas involving urban wildlife in absurd or poignant predicaments, to invite reflection on the fragility and transience and strangeness of life, as well as its intrinsic beauty. I believe the purpose of art is to capture and communicate thoughts and feelings that resist expression in ordinary language. Whenever I encounter art that does this successfully, it's like meeting someone for the first time whom you feel like you've known all your life. My goal is to create watercolors that not only look strikingly different from most other watercolors, but which also create that kind of essential connection between the viewer and something both familiar and larger than life.