Steve Wilson (1945-2013) was the son of a transient oil line pipe layer growing up in the back seat of a Ford, settling nowhere but celebrating birthdays across the American southwest or wherever oil was next discovered. Somewhere on the road Wilson began to draw, paint and construct but more importantly began to read, visualizing from lines of words a world of color, form, and design that would become his passion as time progressed. Never pausing in his quest of the written word, Wilson was a high school dropout who attended the University of Arizona, later settling in Colorado having inherited the wanderlust of a bohemian aesthetic and lifestyle. He was consumed by the counterculture of the early 1960s becoming a fixture in the "Denver Underground" befriended by the likes of Hunter Thompson, Stan Brakhage, and Allen Ginsberg. Wilson supported his artistic endeavors by working as an antiquarian bookseller and publisher of underground poetry.
Sporadically represented by prominent galleries, Wilson preferred to make art for those within his inner circle, creating a large body of paintings and constructions. The majority of which were collages made for close friends and his spiritual partner and companion Michelle White. Steve and Michelle shared a daily ritual, the exchanging of card-collages, each with an intimate dialogue, detailing the dreams, passions, ideas and memories that consumed their lives. His art was about both the city that informed him and the open space of the rural landscape that gave him life and the woman that drove his desires.
This archive of art and dialogue was discovered early in the millennium by two collectors investigating the Bohemian art scene in Colorado. In 2009 a major retrospective of his work was shown at the Emmanuel Gallery at the University of Colorado Denver, and in 2014 his work was shown at the Nailya Alexander Gallery in New York City. Currently his collages are represented at Cavin-Morris Gallery.
Courtesy Paul Harbough
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