Helen Wilson is an award-winning, highly respected painter who has earned a solid reputation  for her portraiture and figurative work.  Since her graduation from Glasgow School of Art in 1976 she has quietly painted and gradually developed a solid following for her beautiful paintings that are now sought after by collectors in London and Scotland. 

In the early years it was her daughter, Jenny, while training with the English National Ballet, who sparked Helen’s interest in the ballet as a subject for her exquisite draftsmanship and painting.  Her passionate interest in the subject of ballet led to a five-day visit to the Royal Ballet rehearsals for the Queen’s 80th Birthday Gala in London in 2005.   Here she had the opportunity of observing and drawing many of her favourite ballets and subjects, including the now retired Prima Ballerina Darcey Bussell.   Helen’s ability to tell a tale through painting enabled her to successfully turn her observations and sketches into paintings that were to become the subject of her first Solo exhibition in London in 2006.   The exhibition was a great success and won her many high profile fans and clients.   There is nothing she likes better than to be in a quiet corner of a rehearsal room observing, with her keen artistic eye, the preparations for a performance. This year her solo exhibition, A Portrait of Scottish Opera, at the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh, was the result of many months of working behind the scenes at the Opera.  The exhibition faithfully told the story, in paintings, of the behind the scenes daily activities of all in a season at the  Scottish Opera.

Born in Paisley in 1954, she graduated from Glasgow School of Art and Hospitalfield from 1971 to 1976.   During this time she won many prestigious awards, prizes and scholarships.   Helen has exhibited widely in London, USA and Scotland.  She was elected member of Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts 1984, Royal Scottish Watercolour Society in 1997 and Paisley Arts Institute  in 2005.   Her paintings are held in numerous collections including Darcey Bussell and Carol Vorderman.

AWARDS

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

Works in various private and public collections, including:
Glasgow Art Gallery, Kelvingrove
Paisley Museum and Art Gallery
Scottish Arts Council
Glasgow School of Art
Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons
Bank of Scotland
Arthur Andersen
Garrick Club London
Royal College of Ophthalmologists

2 PERSON SHOWS
1985   With David Donaldson - Mayfest, Corners Gallery, Glasgow
1983   With Christine McArthur, Kelly Gallery, Glasgow
1982   With David Toner, Corners Gallery, Glasgow

Various mixed exhibitions including:
RGI
RSW
RSA
RA
Compass Gallery, Glasgow
Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh
Cyril Gerber Fine Art
Thompson’s Gallery, London
Panter and Hall, London
Pringle Fine Art, Princeton N.J. USA
John Player Portrait Competition
Garrick/Milne Competition
Singer/Friedlander Competition
Threadneedle Competition
 

OTHER PROJECTS

2001            Art work for feature film “American Cousins”
2010             Set design for “Rape of Lucretia”, St Andrews Opera

Homes & Interiors Scotland magazine in late 2007

THERE is a framed letter by the fireplace in Helen Wilson’s living room, which draws as clear a portrait about the artist as a young woman as any one of her paintings.

It is dated 1969 and signed by the celebrated sculptor Henry Moore, then in his early 70s. The typed missive, sent to 15-year-old Helen, was in response to a fan letter she had sent and in it, he speaks of how inspiring it is that a ‘young person’ takes the time to write to him about his work. Enclosed with the letter was a signed copy of a just-published book chronicling his life and times.

“I was encouraged to write by the artist Charles McQueen, then head of art at my school, the John Neilston Institute in Paisley and a really inspirational figure in my life,” she recalls. “I remember being so excited when the book arrived in the post at my house. I couldn’t wait to take it into school to show people, but when I got there, I realised I’d have to wait until I had an art class because no-one else would who Henry Moore was.”

Bearing in mind that in 1969, most self-respecting teenagers’ heads would be filled with flower power, not to mention sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll, it was clear that even as a young woman, Helen Wilson quietly and deliberately swam against the tide.

She followed her instincts, if not her parents’ initial wishes, and attended Glasgow School of Art from 1971-1976, where her sense of individuality, talent and unique use of colour was noted from an early stage.

Self-effacing, contemplative to the point of professorial, Helen’s work is now becoming increasingly sought-after in collecting circles in both Scotland and London, with most works selling in excess of £1000.

Earlier this year, she held her first solo exhibition in London at Thompson’s Marylebone Gallery. The show marked a watershed in her 28-year-painting career, bringing her exquisite draftsmanship and ability to tell a tale through a paintbrush to a wider, appreciative audience. According to Judy Stafford of Thompson’s, she is one of the ‘best artists in working Scotland at the moment.’ “She has been hiding her light under a bush,” she adds. “But I think her time has come.”

The show won her many high profile fans, including Carol Vorderman and the prima ballerina Darcey Bussell, one of many subjects she painted during a behind-the-scenes visit to the Royal Ballet in rehearsal at the Royal Opera House in London last year. Much of the material Helen gathered there was honed to form a body of work for her Thompson’s show and the highlight of the exhibition’s private viewing was the charity auction of a painting Helen had done of a pair of Bussell’s red ballet shoes.

“Darcey and her husband tried to buy the painting,” she explains. “But,

in the end they were outbid. It sold for £4,200 but they went on to commission me to paint another red shoes painting for them. I haven’t started it yet because I was busy working towards another exhibition with the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh but I have to confess, I’m quite nervous. Nothing is good enough in my eyes for Darcey!”

Helen says this with a smile but behind her gentle demeanour is someone who finds the public side of the artist’s life – such as exhibition openings – nerve-wracking.

She has lived in the same first floor tenement flat in Glasgow’s west end for over 20 years and it is an intensely private space. She paints in a WASPS studio in the centre of Glasgow, so her home is her retreat from the world. Around the walls are paintings by friends and contemporaries. There are works by Willie Rodger, Christine MacArthur and Gary Anderson, as well as series of small quirky prints by Anderson’s wife, the sculptor Shona Kinloch, sent each year as a Christmas card.

In the hub of the flat, the kitchen, a whole wall is devoted to her pictures of her 21-year-old daughter Jenny, who has just finished her training as a ballet dancer in London. Helen brought up her daughter alone after separating from her father when she was just a toddler.

Although she always painted throughout her daughter’s childhood, it has only been in the last few years that she has been able to give free rein to her work and the result is a prolific output, inspired by life behind the scenes at the ballet.

Helen’s interest in portraying life backstage came about through her daughter’s growing immersion in this world. “Jenny started going to classes when she was three and I had no prior knowledge of ballet,” she explains. “But you get drawn into it and as she progressed and it became clear she was good and could make a career out of it, I found myself wondering who these ballet dancers really were. They seemed so alien to me.

“I suppose I was drawn into it because I wanted to make sense of the world my daughter was now becoming immersed in. By watching them evolve, I could see what was happening with Jenny. At the same time it’s the dancers I am interested in rather than the ballet.”

In the last few years, as well as her stint at the Royal Opera House, Helen has spent several spells behind the scenes with Scottish Ballet and at the Theatre Royal in Glasgow – and her work has evolved accordingly. Her next foray behind-the-scenes will be at

The Dance School of Scotland in Knighswood, Glasgow.

She has always been a narrative painter with a strong accent on portraiture but now, she feels, with this latest interest, she is ‘marrying the two up’. A Helen Wilson painting begs questions. Her paintings of ballet shoes bear the imprint of the wearer, of hour upon hour of hard graft in class. They chip away layers and are not about glamour or the high drama of a first night. They are about life, which for all of us has public and private faces. It is this forensic approach which sets Helen Wilson’s work apart.

Not that her paintings are devoid of humour. One canvas depicts an elegant pair of black high-heeled shoes entitled, New Shoes, No Character, revealing a levity that has always run through her work.

A quarter of a century ago, just six years out of art school and at a stage when most artists are still fishing around for a voice, her quiet confidence and talent was obvious in a Collins Exhibition Hall touring solo exhibition which showed all over Scotland.

Presciently, in an introduction to the exhibition, her old Glasgow School of Art mentor, the artist John Cunningham wrote: “Characteristically most of her work is based on the fragmentary and kaleidoscopic images which are relevant to some experience or other. The resulting work is descriptive and painterly – not merely illustrative… This exhibition is a most timely acknowledgement of her achievement and, more important, an expression of confidence and encouragement for the future where she is sure to discover many other sorts of rainbows.”

Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, Helen Turner is doing just that.