Born in Iowa in 1924, Wilson is known for a career that negotiated a delicate balance between absolutely realistic subject matter--mostly landscapes-- and an abstractionist's care for the purity of color and form. One critic writes of her work:  "Her outdoor transformations point to the constant re-visioning of reality that is the very reason painters paint."

 

Wilson studied with Philip Guston at the University of Iowa in the 1940s.  In 1949, she and her husband left for New York and settled in Greenwich Village. At that time, Wilson was working in an abstract expressionist mode, creating work that resonated with the energy of the moment. Later in the decade, she shifted to expressionist landscapes. Among the many artists whom she met at the time, Fairfield Porter, older and more established, became especially important to her, as his commitment to modernist representational painting supported her return to landscape painting.

 

Later she would become friends with Jane Freilicher--"the two Janes"--and both would spend large periods of time at their homes in Watermill, in the Hamptons.  There the atmospherics of the flat land, the beach, the water and the sun would greatly influence Wilson's later work.

 

Alice Neel was a friend of Wilson and her husband John Gruen and painted them and their daughter.  The Family is one of her best-known works.

 

Wilson's work can be found in the collections of the Met, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Hirshhorn, the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.