Erica Wilson

Erica Wilson is a ginger, a very vibrant ginger, that is. She is also the only person I have ever met that can successfully wear leather pants. Alongside her tiny frame is a big personality demanding attention when she enters a room—or people might just be looking at the pants.

She is a born again resident of Brooklyn, NY and Irish whiskey served neat is her drink of choice. She has a BFA from Pratt and a MFA Georgia State University.

Dashboard/Courtney Hammond: Your resume is pretty hefty; when did you begin working seriously towards an artistic career?

Eric Wilson: I remember being a kid and really enjoying scribbling my crayons all about - paying no mind to the lines. I suppose I started taking my art serious about it when I was that rebellious high school age. It was the sort of anti-establishment, non-conforming adolescent phase that I think a lot of artists go through.  From there I did the whole art school thing, which pretty much led to me not producing any art for two years. Many claim that art school kills your spirit. It does.  Finally, I got my bearings, started to figure out what I was doing; where I was going; how to show my work; new ideas and so on. 

Dash: Oh, art school. Yeah, it can remove your creative guts, not to mention you have clean toilets, sling booze and skin aardvarks to pay back your loans. So, tell me a bit about your style. You have a pretty consistent theme throughout your work.

EW: Actually my earlier works were extremely figurative. I have a very old body of work, which incorporates dismembered females, cadavers, car wrecks – a bit dark, a bit disturbing. I think I have always been interested in creation and destruction, of everything. I really like putting things together and then taking them apart. I began transitioning these thoughts into my current fashion of painting when I was living in New York. The decay of the architecture and the beauty I found in the colors and shapes. I found this to be more dynamic than what I pictured them as in their initial state. 

Dash: Was this your main influence?

EW: This is also when I discovered Andre Palliado - who has been extremely influential to me as well. These two concepts, Palliado’s architectural plans that symbolized creation, harmony and balance hand in hand with the decay of my immediate surrounding; and Brooklyn were essentially my basic structure for painting.  I consider my paintings as living maps.

Dash: Why do you consider them as living? Is it your process or your attachment?

EW: Well, I do think of them as my children, my 8 foot tall children that I will be lugging around for the rest of my life. That is not why I call them living though. I am always playing with control and the Western way of planning as well as Eastern thought that things will simply be what they will. When I work on these, I make a basic outline and the painting grows on its own. It chooses its own path and I lose more and more control as it progresses.

Dash: The topic on my plate this week has been artist empowerment. What would make you feel more empowered as an artist and do you think this would lead to more open creativity.

EW: The ability to fly, regenerate body parts, throw fire…I’ll take all of it please. But seriously, I wish that everyone could realize the importance of art in their communities, as a main element of our culture and find a way to support, be it through financial ways or just by acknowledgment of the efforts. True empowerment would come for us, just the acknowledgment – we will take the money too though. So many artistic accomplishments don’t get to be experienced by those that need to or could benefit in some way from the encounter. If I felt more support in general from my community I would feel that success at any level would be more possible.