High regard for Helen Miranda Wilson

I will expect and do quite fear an urgent e-bulletin:

Helen Miranda Wilson regrets that she cannot tolerate extravagant appreciations from persons unknown to her.

Nonetheless...
(note: images and text used with appreciation and without permission)

At the end of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, the pugnacious urchin Linda rejects the promise of treasures she has inherited (stultification in a grim boarding school, and the possible flushing of the liberty of her own life down into the sewers of social respectability and security) and instead walks off into a more dangerous unknown, in the company of an even more pugnacious girl... let us say to rough out the years remaining to her in rowdy cities, with alcohol, jazz music, petty crimes, and a beat trail to Hollywood, where she writes stories and scripts for movies that will not be published or produced until their visionary truth is recognized, many years after she succumbs to the various ravages of life lived as misadventure.

Which is to say: independence. So difficult to muster.

A fashion of an autobiographical note by HMW:
I used to live in New York City. Now, I live in Wellfleet, MA, the town I grew up in. I paint. I draw. I show. Sometimes it sells. My parents are dead. I have no children. I own the house I grew up in. I don't have a mortgage. I am a public servant, specializing in land use. In the last nine years, I have served on the Zoning Board of Appeals, the Planning Board, the Water Issues Advisory Committee, the Housing Authority, two Affordable Housing Task Forces, the Shellfish Advisory Board and the Selectboard, all in Wellfleet. I am a beekeeper, with five colonies. I keep chickens. I grow a lot of our vegetables and fruits. I am a member of the International Magnolia Society. I like to spend time reading in bed with cats. I have enough money to go to the movies, anytime I want and to buy as many tree peonies as I want. This was not always the case. I have good fortune. My mother loved me but she died in 1979. Her kindness informs my life. Half my family, on her side, is Russian or German. She grew up in Europe. She painted when she was young but then she stopped. Studied with Hans Hoffman in Munich when she was 17. b. 1948

Some reviews:
New York Times
By JOHN RUSSELL
Published: February 11, 1983

THE evident speciality of Helen Miranda Wilson, whose new paintings can be seen through Feb. 26 at the Monique Knowlton Gallery, 19 East 71st Street, is the small domestic interior. To be more precise, it is the very small domestic interior - the size of a jumbo postcard, a paperback novel or the pocket of a country coat.
But ''small'' in this instance is not a disparagement. Miss Wilson does not think small. She thinks big, and condenses. There is more to her tiny paintings than to most of the huge, rambling, overblown ''realist'' paintings in which we can count the stitches on the rug and read the small print on the telephone bill.
To begin with, she is a consummate editor. Nothing is there that doesn't need to be there. Next, she is very good indeed at what is now called miniaturization. With just a patch of color and a nicely judged contour she can tell us something important about where people live and how. We know who lives alone, who is expecting a lover, who is fanatical about the placing of every least object in the room and who is letting things drift for a while.
The sense of place is particularly exact in the metropolitan scenes. Miss Wilson is great on the distant industrial views that New York has to offer in profusion. Even if they are sometimes hideous in themselves, those views are ennobled by the scale, the light and the almost palpable irritability of Nature as she tries out one kind of weather after another and can't make up her mind which one to stick with.
In the country, Miss Wilson's touch seems to be not quite so sure. Possibly it is because the subject of the New Yorker set free for the summer has been so well and so often treated by others. Possibly it is because she is so absolutely right about metropolitan life that we rather begrudge the change of scene. Possibly it is because her figures - so exact and tender when encountered in the city - get a little stiff and emblematic when she puts them out of doors.
Be that as it may, her interiors are a continual delight - for her precise and unrhetorical way with the brush, her subtlety of color and her command of complicated psychological situations for which there is no one easy resolution. Imagine early Vuillard distilled and clarified by an understated but fearless imagination, and you will not be too far from the impact of these little paintings.

Helen Miranda Wilson at DC Moore - New York
Art in America, Dec, 2002 by Joe Fyfe
There's something almost medieval about Helen Miranda Wilson's small, carefully detailed paintings of the contemporary world. The human presence seems momentarily silenced by God's vast works, whether evidenced in distant vistas or in humble objects. Wilson anoints these moments: how the sky looked on a particular day (Clouds, Early Afternoon, July 1999, oil on wood, 11 by 14 inches), what was on her desk on another (Tooth, November 1999) or what it's like at the town dump (At the Transfer Station, Wellfleet, Ma., 1999). This diaristic exhibition, a gathering of improvised and sustained projects, included interior still lifes oppressively framed in glossy black wood as well as a series of sumi ink drawings of nasturtiums and honeysuckle, and some pencil drawings that seem to be studies for parts of paintings. Then there were the landscapes, which seem to communicate Wilson's vision of the world most directly. These unframed outdoor scenes of Cape Cod and rural New York State reveal a kind of tremulously peaceable kingdom.
One aspect of many of the inland scenes recalls Martin Johnson Heade, the 19th-century American artist who specialized in landscapes poised ahead of approaching rain. Wild Apple, from the Top of Mt. Rascal, Argyle, N. Y., an 11-by-11-inch oil-on-wood painting, for example, depicts an apple tree in the foreground of rolling mountainside fields interrupted by lines of dark green trees. The deep blue sky above is heavy with weather, and the distant mountains are almost completely obscured by moisture-laden air. The view feels simultaneously antique and immediate, as if you were looking at the distant landscape in a Brueghel and recognized the Catskills. There is also remarkable depth to Wilson's painted skies, and from a few feet away they almost seem to come alive.
Being the daughter of the novelist and literary critic Edmund Wilson may account for her seemingly innate trust in the power of description, the area where the visual and the verbal most comfortably overlap. Unlike her poetic-realist contemporaries, Wilson doesn't appear to require a specific psychological manner.


Helen Miranda Wilson
by John Yau
In these paintings Wilson moves into a territory that is all her own. The paintings are color sensations in which a complex range of feelings and possible readings are evoked. It used to be, or so some people claim, that when a painter did something new and different, others would notice it. Except in the case of very few artists, this hasn’t been the case in years. Wilson doesn’t care, and that is to her credit. She has persistently gone her own way for nearly forty years, and never made a single concession to the marketplace or to stylistic trends. That, to me, is heroic.

Unrhetorical? Consummate editor? Lucidity, force, ease.

Art in Review; Helen Miranda Wilson
By GRACE GLUECK
Published: October 21, 2005
DC Moore Gallery
724 Fifth Avenue, at 57th Street
Through Nov. 5

In what seems like a radical departure from her previous painting, which focused recognizably on the natural world, Helen Miranda Wilson shows oil-on-panel geometrical abstractions composed entirely of small colored squares, rectangles and parts thereof. Each of these ''calendar paintings'' refers to events in her life about the time they were painted; each unit of color represents a day.
The switch in her work to this kind of shorthand, she explains, has occurred because of a busier life. Having moved back to the Cape Cod town where she grew up, she has become an elected official and a beekeeper. So the patches of color, neatly laid out but with a handmade look -- edges that bleed slightly, drips of primer material -- represent a diminution in her desire ''to work from observation.''
Although there is no recognizable subject matter in the panels, they do have titles, like ''Tom's Salad, Thanksgiving Day,'' in which the patches, not uniformly aligned and occurring in intense colors modified by silvery grays and blacks, could conceivably celebrate a salad blitz made for a large company. And some have dates for titles, one being ''February 19, 2004,'' in which a bright red rectangle (a red letter day?) stands out among more sedate hues. Other visual stimuli include flags, quilts and honeycombs.
The softness and eccentric placement of the patches leavens the severity of their geometrics, giving the panels a folksy quality that reminds me of the painter Al Jensen's garrulous (and far more complex) schemes, minus their philosophical underpinning.


Observations of her father:
From THE FIFTIES
1952 In New York she developed a tummy-ache one morning in a way that suggested she did not want to go to school. Later she ate a large candy, and when they said they thought she was sick, she answered, “That piece of candy was weeping to be eaten.”
1953 Helen – about to play in a mud puddle: Mud is my heart’s desire.
When I asked her to pick things up: Am I the housemaid? We couldn’t make out where she had heard of housemaids.
July 1953. Helen was ill and had to go to bed just before the 4th of July. She said, “Put an ad in the paper and say, ‘No fireworks till the little girl is well.’”
Helen at Talcottville: “Little girls like lemon drops, and fathers understand, because they like lemon drops too – but mothers resist lemon drops.”
At Flat Rock, paddling – sitting around in the shallow water: “Oh, this is so enjoyable!”
1955 Helen has learned a little German. She likes to say “Genung!” and makes a quite mature gesture with her hand when the waiter is helping her to something
Talcottville: Helen, dictating a letter, wanted to say it was “very dull here”: when I remonstrated with her a little, she said, “Well, make it dullish.”
Helen said, as she was leaving for school: “I want to come back to a warm house, permeated with the smell of cookies.”
1956 Helen, when she wakes up in the morning, tells her mother her dreams. This morning, she said that she had dreamed that she had become very small, so that the cats were much bigger than she was: There were those great furry things, and I was quite tiny! Light Ginger had begun to claw at her, and she had said to her, Stop that! I’m still your mistress. Then she added to her mother: This is partly fiction.