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Kay Wilson’s work at Warren gallery
WARREN — “She would be sitting in her studio painting, and I’d tell her about my day in school,” Leslie Hancock said of her mother, Kay Wilson, a nationally recognized artist from Canfield.
Hancock spoke about her mother Saturday at the Trumbull Art Gallery during the opening of an exhibition of 54 of her mother’s oil paintings, which runs through Jan. 9.
Wilson’s paintings, created with a palette knife rather than a brush, range from homey portraits of her children; her husband, David, standing in a cornfield; and self-portraits; to landscapes and florals and abstract works, for which she garnered numerous awards.
Hancock said it was exciting to see the variety of her mother’s work.
“I don’t know that we’ve ever had it all in one place before,” she said.
Her mother, who died May 10, 2007, at age 69, was quoted about her painting:
“I’m searching for a magical blend of representational and contemporary painting concepts, where ‘what I paint’ and ‘how I paint’ will merge into a harmonious personal statement.”
“She loved painting in different styles. It was fun for her but also a dilemma because she thought that an artist should pick a style and stay with it,” said Hancock of Findlay, herself a graphic artist.
She and her two sisters, Julianne Burnett of Austintown and Rhonda Collins of Hilliard, grew up in Canfield and graduated from Canfield High School.
Their father — Wilson’s husband — David Wilson, still lives in Canfield but also spends a lot of time at his family’s farm in Lordstown. He was a supervisor at Youngstown Sheet & Tube in Youngstown until it closed and he lost his job “like everybody else.” Now, he considers himself a farmer.
Kay Wilson was born in Pemberville near Bowling Green and grew up in the Dayton area. She studied at the Dayton Art Institute and Miami University of Ohio before marrying and moving to Austintown and finishing her bachelor of science degree in art education at Youngstown State University.
During her 45-year career as a painter, about the amount of time the Wilsons lived in Canfield, she gave art lessons in her home and at TAG and the Butler Institute of American Art. The Butler, in 2002, awarded her its Clyde Singer Life Achievement in the Visual Arts Medal. She assisted on the Youngstown YWCA’s annual Women in Art show.
She was also well-known for her commissioned portraits, such as that of Mahoning County Common Pleas Judge Frank Battisti that hangs in the federal courthouse in Youngstown. Her work can be seen in many public buildings in the area.
One of her best friends, Maureen Creager, in a eulogy at Wilson’s funeral, said her friend had a “brilliant, inquiring mind and was the only true intellectual I’ve ever known.”
The 54 paintings in the exhibit, many of which are for sale, were selected from works left in her studio to demonstrate the variety of her work, said Beth Ensign, TAG curator, and Pat Galgozy, consultant and director of the TAG Gallery, located at 198 E. Market St.
TAG’s normal hours are noon to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. The public is invited to a gallery talk by Hancock at 11 a.m. Dec. 5.