Studio: international art (89.1925)

D. FORRESTER WILSON, A.R.S.A.
BY E. A. TAYLOR. 000

VARIOUS are the roads by which an
artist must travel, if he would seek
genuinely to interpret himself, and there
is certainly no royal road to the attain-
ment of that achievement. I think
Mr. Forrester Wilson has found that out
through the devious paths he has chosen
in his spirit of artistic adventure. Born in
the city of Glasgow, it was there after
several years of following a commercial
career one would have found him as a
student under the encouraging influence
of Mr. Fra. H. Newbery in that city's
art school, where to-day he enthusias-
tically fills the position as one of the
prominent members of its teaching staff.
To attempt to classify his work amongst
that of other Scottish artists, perhaps the
terms allegorical and symbolical might
both be applied with a share of equality to
many of his most recent important paint-
ings, and notably to such subjects as have
already been illustrated in The Studio,
Passing Day, Vanity and The Valley of
Melting Snow, 0000
Like the majority of artists he had
earlier periods consisting chiefly of paint-
ings of interiors, old stone and lime-
washed buildings, landscapes and por-
traits, in which a more literal treatment
was observably dominating him, but he
felt ultimately that instead of painting so
literally, to be able to interpret the more
vital emotions of nature, adventure into
more abstract ways to attain that greater
realisation must be sought. His The
Muse of Silence is illustrative of the out-
come of those thoughts. The subject
Vol. LXXXIX. No. 385—April 1925.

" time and history." panel in the
banqueting hall, city chambers, glas-
gow. by d. forrester wilson, a.r.s.a.

(By courtesy of the Glasgow Corporation)

being originally suggested to him by one
of nature's large and solitary expanses,
comprising hill and dale and rocks, which
rather than treat in the still prevalent belief
that fidelity to nature is the basic principle
of all art, he evolved his emotions of it by
a more spirited and personal process of
thoughtful elimination, selection and ar-
rangement. In it one feels an equal appeal
is distributed between the figure and its
background, and though abstractly con-
ceived clearly defines his personal method
of combining a real human figure in a
similarly treated landscape. To be para-
doxical, it reveals him as a realist in his
idealism. The same objective thoughts
are evident in his The Song, in which his
desire was to evoke the sensation of its
rhythm and cadence and suggest the spirit
of its music by the figure's expression and
movement. 0000a
Mr. Wilson, however, did not change
his style or his subject motives all of a
sudden ; he still maintains a passionate
love for old buildings and landscapes, and
there are many features which exist in
his earlier work which may be observed
more decoratively combined in his Field
Life. In it the details and symbols, being
the ordinary everyday things of farm-
workers, are all in their simplicity of char-
acter readily followed and understood.
(Though to be hyper-critical, the strength
of the value of the ploughed field imme-
diately above the horse's back is, at first
glance, inclined to appear as part of the
horse's trappings; that, however, may
be due to over-emphasis in the reproduc-
tion.) 000000
His important function in the Glasgow
School of Art as one of the masters of the

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