Jane Wilson

Jane Wilson (April 29, 1924 – January 13, 2015) was an American painter associated with both landscape painting and expressionism. She lived and worked in New York City and Watermill, New York.

Wilson was born in Seymour, Iowa and grew up on a farm there during the Great Depression. She was the first of two girls born to Wayne Wilson, a civil engineer, and Cleone Margaret Marquis, a teacher, novelist and poet. Both parents came from farming families.

Wilson attributed her longstanding interest in landscape to her deep relationship with the natural elements as a child in Iowa. "The landscape was enormously meaningful to me," she said. "I used to roam around a lot by myself as a child, and when I think of a landscape, I think of the great weight of the sky and how it rests on the earth. And I remember the light. Light is specific to certain places, and what sort of light and landscape formation you grow up with is immensely influential to what you do later on."

In 1941, at the age of seventeen, Wilson enrolled at the University of Iowa, where she studied both painting and art history. The department had previously been chaired by Grant Wood, a painter associated with 1930s Regionalism. By the 1940s, however, the department looked toward New York City's burgeoning European ex-patriate and American Abstract Expressionist scenes. Dr. Lester D. Longman reorganized the faculty, which included James Lechay and Philip Guston. Of her undergraduate experience, Wilson said: "The head of the art department, Lester Longman, would travel to New York, select, and bring back whole exhibitions for our benefit, with painting ranging from the majestic expressionist Max Beckmann to the upstart, Jackson Pollock. Another time, Dr. Longman borrowed a hundred paintings from the Metropolitan Museum, hung them all over the art department for us to study and live with. So, back in the '40s we were exposed not only to real live masterpieces, but to the first glimmerings of Abstract Expressionism." After graduating Phi Beta Kappa, Wilson taught art history at the university for two years.

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