Douglas Fenn Wilson’s creative pursuits are Renaissance in breadth. The past 47 years have spawned a massive body of painting, sculpture, and architectural detail, of which his “sculptural” and “layered” paintings figure most prominently—a meticulous layering of realism against multi-faceted sculptural substrates. His interest in bridging artistic traditions and genres not normally bridged is where Wilson breaks ground—the two-dimensional with the three-dimensional; realism with abstraction; past with present. 

His work has been the subject of fifteen one-man exhibitions from San Francisco to New York; eight museums have acquired pieces for their collections. In 1990 Gore Vidal wrote: “he is like Poussin! — in the best original sense, academic.”

Wilson writes: 

“My eye’s impulse is to peel back, to shear away, to reveal what lies below the surface—small, multi-layered patterns at first, then shallow layers of geometry, then deep, building blocks of color—the beautiful unseen.”