{"title":"Beth Wilks","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg style=\"max-height: 300px; max-width:55%\" src=\"https:\/\/helloart-prod-bucket.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com\/media\/artist\/beth-wilks\/beth-wilks-profile.jpg\"\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBeth Wilks was born Heidi Elisabeth Lowther in mid-sixties Southeast Vancouver to working class poet activists. She started regularly drawing at age 3, inspired by frequent family trips to the Gulf Islands. Responding to unfolding chaos in the home, she drew with increasing intricacy and concentration, which eased tension and resulted in positive attention in otherwise volatile situations. Her art then became interwoven with developmental trauma as a means of survival. Later, her grandmother, an accomplished landscape artist in oils, taught her shading and drawing from observation, but couldn’t lure her away from the pencil. For many turbulent years, Beth made art sporadically, unable to forge a specific identity or evolve creatively, due to persistent poverty and all too frequent moves. Making art to please others, she gave away most of her occasional work. Seeking new directions required waiting for a backdrop of stability in which to create an authentic voice, a gift which eluded her until midlife. \r\u003cbr\u003e\r\u003cbr\u003eShe has an ongoing look at the sentience of nonhuman life through unique illustrative portraiture, began in 2013, evolving from a fascination since childhood with animals as characters in their own right. Having worked in libraries for over 30 years, her process naturally begins with research. Dozens of anatomical reference photos, books, articles, etc. line her shelves and help her find the essence of her subjects, which, linked cognitively to childhood trauma, still retain elements of the naive: painstakingly rendered fur, feathers, or scales often appear isolated on the page, floating in a minimalist void, like eidetic memories frozen in time.\r\u003cbr\u003e\r\u003cbr\u003eWith her case of over 250 coloured pencils, collected since the seventies and including rare, discontinued shades, Beth seeks to remind the human viewer of the presence, meaning, complexity, and value of the lives of others, each embodying the pinnacle of evolution, and to evoke their remembrance in the context of global-industrial agriculture, deforestation, and human-driven climate emergency.\r\u003cbr\u003e\r\u003cbr\u003e“I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d; I stand and look at them long and long…. So they show their relations to me and I accept them, They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.”\r\u003cbr\u003e\r\u003cbr\u003e– Walt Whitman\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch4\u003eARTIST’S STATEMENT\u003c\/h4\u003e\u003cp\u003eUsing anatomy photos, classic scientific and children’s illustration, and personal research as touchstones, I aim to examine our common ground with nonhuman animals, alongside their nature as pure outsiders: the liminality between wildness and urbanity, domestication or freedom, and the agency, expression, presence – the personhood – unique to each species. The humble medium of coloured pencil supports this aim, requiring patient layering and increasing complexity of line, until the creatures are ultimately revealed. Historical children’s illustration, classification systems, fractal geometry, and superhero comics inform my creatures’ characterizations; their superpowers are their extraordinarily diverse patterns and textures, the perfection of their adaptability both to their specific ecosystems (which in the drawings manifest as halos), and to living on a planet overrun by one dominant species of primate.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[],"url":"https:\/\/helloart.com\/fr\/collections\/beth-wilks.oembed","provider":"helloart","version":"1.0","type":"link"}