Does that cover it all now? Music, painting, book authorship and now, the art of the playwright and musical theatre. Maybe he’s building skyscrapers out of moon rocks on the side. It would only partly surprise me.
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As Wilson’s new musical “Beautiful Scars” (based on his bestselling memoir of the same name) premieres at Theatre Aquarius, his new show of paintings at Beckett Fine Art is taking its place at the table. A full-bodied wine at a food pairing, as it were.
“Wilson’s journey, searching for his true identity is so touching, so telling, that performing
Another Tom, Tom Beckett, owner of Beckett Fine Art, has Wilson’s latest music playing in the background as I continually adjust my eyes to the shifting dynamics in the paintings. They seem to pulse between the tiniest cellular details and the larger membranes of shape that those details swim in. Facial features, crows’ beaks, crescent moons, animals, skies, symbols, many drawn from Indigenous mythology.
Tom Wilson’s “Skyholder,” right, is seen inside Beckett Fine Art.
Beckett Fine Art
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Wilson’s paintings here are commanding, robust with colour, line and mass, all of it excited by the play between dark inky blues and black and forcefully vibrant jewel-like hues. They are probably his best painted works yet, which is some kind of burning-the-midnight-oil miracle, because almost all of them were done in the last year, when he was also touring, writing new music, working on a second book, “Blood Memory,” and putting together the musical/play version of “Beautiful Scars.”
“I’ve been following Tom Wilson since the early ‘80s when I’d see him every Sunday with his band The Florida Razors at the Gown and Gavel, working hard to make a career in music,” Beckett tells me.
Despite succeeding at it, or maybe because of the drive that accomplishment brings, Wilson has not eased his foot off the gas in the intervening four decades. If anything, his motor is running hotter than ever.
The books, the play, more art, more music. But we’re here now to talk about the paintings.
From a purely visual standpoint, they somehow feel both spontaneously improvised and rigorously structured. There is so much implicit movement in them that they seem to be dressing themselves as you look, but upon lingering examination it’s clear that they’re very exact and compositional.
There are action painting effects, like spatters, which perhaps suggest blood, in keeping with the themes of the show, but there’s also a kind of architecture to the different shape fields and blocks of colour that Wilson lays out here.
“Seaway,” oil on canvas, 20 x 20 inches, 2024, by Tom Wilson.
Beckett Fine Art
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Designed? Intentional? Yes, for sure. When you get up close you see, in among the shapes and colours, there are stylized letters and symbols — words and names painted into the traffic.
These not only add to the texture, visually, but they usher us into the thematic business. For, as strong as these paintings are visually, as ably as they stand on their own formal and material strengths, they are not abstracts. The paintings are moving explorations of a vast personal and socio-cultural territory. Identity, heritage, the mix and collision of cultures, the joy of ritual, dream and tradition as well as the scarring of trauma, all overlaid in a way by the interplay of nature, humanity and spirit.
Some of the work is darkly haunting such as “Will Not Be Destroyed.” It depicts two cloaked faceless human shapes — nuns (alluding to the residential school issue) — on either side of what appear to be masked warrior faces.
The shrouded nuns, “a recurring motif in several of Wilson’s recent paintings … appear to be confronted by mashed warrior faces in postures of defiance,” according to the new book “Mohawk Warriors, Hunters and Chiefs: The Art of Tom Wilson.”
The book notes that Wilson’s mother was forced to attend residential schools. Wilson’s painting squares up to these issues but, as hard as they may be, they do so in an engaging way. Of course, all of his work — drama, book, song, art — is coloured, even largely defined, by the revelation almost 10 years ago of his hitherto unknown Indigenous ancestry, the subject of “Beautiful Scars.”
It would be a mistake though to construe his recent paintings as a break from his earlier work. His painting has long been strongly influenced by the dreamlike, mythological and boldly colourful work of Norval Morrisseau, founder of the Woodland style. This type of work aligned with some natural instinct of expression in the young Wilson, long before he consciously suspected the truths to come.
You can trace the debt back to Wilson’s earlier painting but it is very evident here as well as in certain recurring figures, like the sinuous lines studded with circles or nodes — they look like neurons in a way, with their branching fibres and cell bodies — and I think that in Woodland style they are called lines of power or prophecy and are part of the visual vocabulary.
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All in all a powerful show and a must see, especially in conjunction with the musical, written by Wilson and Shaun Smyth, at Theatre Aquarius from April 24 to May 11. The show at Beckett Fine Art, 196 Locke St. S., runs to May 18. Wilson is scheduled to be at the gallery Saturday, April 27, from 1 to 5 p.m.
Jeff Mahoney was a reporter and columnist with The Spectator for more than 30 years, writing culture and lifestyle stories, commentary and humour. He can be reached via mahoneyjeff54@gmail.com.
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