Today we’d like to introduce you to Bex Wilkinson

Hi Bex, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?

Bex Wilkinson is a multimedia artist. Her main mediums are acrylic, pastel and gouache. However, she has worked in many mixed media forms including plaster casting, encaustic and recently has begun to work in the medium of fusing glass. Bex’s main drives are that of emotional, psychological and political content. Her focus on current issues, such as Transgender, Criminal Health and Pandemic have fueled her emotional expressionistic creations. After the suicide of her Beloved, Bex took on such topics as death and mortality in her subject matters. Recently her direction has been focused more on “Dead Bird” pastels: a beckoning acknowledgement of the reduction of migrant birds due to Global Warming. Bex does not get stuck in the narrative of negativity, but searches for the beauty within the terror of such grim circumstances.

After the death of her spouse, Bex took to her paint brush and other mediums to create a year long art installation called “The Nature of Impermanence.” Nothing was for sale, all was taken down or burned after the year anniversary of his death. From then on, issues of contemporary culture fueled her angst and expression about world political affairs and a general malaise of a broken health care system. Studies in Buddhism and a fascination with the life of Jesus Christ have been prevalent subject matters in her art.

Bex was influenced strongly by Chicago artists such as Seymour Resofsky, Ivan Albright and “The Harry Who.” Her parents, who were avid art collectors exposed her at a young age to controversial art by these and other names in contemporary or modern culture. Maryan, an artist who survived the Holocaust was her main influence as she grew up with his grizzly images upon her home walls. Her own personal influences are Frida Khalo, Max Beckman, George Segal and Georgia O’keefe: all pioneers of breaking through barriers of the art world in one form or another.

Bex works towards having the viewer question that which is “normal.” Things that are taken for granted as cultural standards need to be questioned and seen out of their context. Modern day living is bombardment of news, advertisements, protocols, and information with is constantly being drilled into the American psyche. Bex asks the viewer to look beyond these “typical” appearances and dig deeper into the matters of the soul.

Bex has had lifetime infatuation with the artist Frida Khalo as a mentor for art. Her long-standing relationship with Visionary Artists, Alex and Allyson Grey, has formulated and validated her expression as an artist. Carl Jung and his studies of archetypes and the unconscious has been her psychological influence. Joan Halifax Roshi, both ordained Zen Priest and anthropologist (and friend,) has influenced Bex’s understanding of spirituality and the bridge of science. And of course, the premier expressionistic painter, Vincent Van Gogh.

Bex’s life has been her artistic career. Both as an artist and art collector. Bex started painting at age six and took a 20 year hiatus to raise a family. During that time her work as a film producer and entrepreneur became her main focus as she brought up her son and daughter. During that time she also helped to begin three film festivals in her current location and became involved with many community institutions promoting art, theater, and film. She is now back to her basic love- painting and drawing. Full circle.

Bex’s life has been her artistic career. Both as an artist and art collector. Bex started painting at age six and took a 20 year hiatus to raise a family. During that time her work as a film producer and entrepreneur became her main focus as she brought up her son and daughter. During that time she also helped to begin three film festivals in her current location and became involved with many community institutions promoting art, theater, and film. She is now back to her basic love- painting and drawing. Full circle.

Bex absolutely loves the surrealists and in her own private art collection, collects artists that resemble this genre. Julie Heffernan, Lauri Hogan, Alan McDonald, are a few of the artists she collects. Along side the surrealists are the Expressionists and Neo-Expressionists. As stated Max Beckman, but also George Groz, Anslem Keifer (more recently) are movements that Bex admires- because of their challenge to the societies in which these artists lived, and how they challenged those norms themselves.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?

I stopped painting for over 20 years. I thought being an artist was too “isolating.” We had no cell phones 25 years ago, and painting became a chore. I didn’t want my art to become work, so I went to graduate school to study Transpersonal Psychology. From there, I “gave up” my art career until the sudden suicide of my second spouse. This sent me into a world of grief and trauma- but strangely brought me back to my passion for painting. I have been painting and showing now for 8 years since his death both nationally and globally. It’s all about timing, and it was not my time to do my craft for over 20 years. Now it is!

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?

Mixed media painter Bex Wilkinson channels what weighs on the collective subconscious using symbols and iconography to guide viewers into what she sees as the, “unending cycle of karma.” Often the subjects of Wilkinson’s contemporary works reveal themselves as archetypes from Jungian psychology.

Wilkinson’s paintings are dark comedy, juxtaposing humorous collaged elements from pop culture against expressionistic imagery – not cleanly portrayed, but rather, projected onto the raw canvases.
Wilkinson is examining the dichotomy of life, the balance of light and dark. There is a sarcastic and jovial mocking perspective of a culture that values shiny objects in the face of daily atrocity, horror and genocide.

Influenced by Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman, Bex’s paintings invite the viewer to engage with the catastrophic daily headlines – and their own demons – but from a distance and with a light-hearted cynicism.
Other notable influences are Judy Chicago and Joan Snyder. Both Chicago and Snyder are tackling seismic devastations – oppression, famine and extinction – across mediums and dimensions.

There’s a sort of tongue-and-cheek, all-knowing, self-aware and reflective quality in Bex’s work which demonstrates itself in the acute and advanced technical skill intentionally shrouded in sparkle and farce.
The loose use of paint, glitter, varnish and stencils represent the overt and abundant imagery that bombards Western society: newspaper headlines, magazine advertisements, billboard campaigns, sex, drugs and Rock and Roll! The multimedia presentation of the stenciled letters is simultaneously universal and unique to the viewer — the rough and broken borders reflective of just that, the rough and broken parameters of archaic power-structures.
Bold brushstrokes and purposeful free-form application speak as metaphor to the chaos that is human experience.

Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?

The willingness to say “Yes,” to things that are offered to me. That is how I have started to show internationally in such a short frame of time. And my willingness to do the work in order to fulfill the “yes.” If you don’t care about your work, or fight for it, why should anyone else? It is the artist’s responsibility to take themselves seriously and to deliver.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.bexwilkinson.com
• Instagram: @bex_wilkinson_art
• Facebook: Bex Wilkinson Art

Image Credits

Him/Creative Inc
Kai Irvine