PEACE AND QUIET IN TUBAC: Famed artist finds contentment in Southern Arizona village

Special to the Green Valley News

Though fame and success are nice, Nicholas Wilson seems to cherish more than those accomplishments a sort of quiet contentment with the only life he’s ever known.

His elementary teachers saw the talent early on and he knew deep inside he had it, too, but the former picture framer from Reno with no formal training accepted, as others with his dream do, that he would probably have to endure those long years as a starving artist to get to where he could make a good living at it.

Problem was, he was so good, it never happened.

Eleven pen and ink drawings of the Chukar Partridge for the Nevada Fish and Game Commission helped lead him to his first break as the Curator of Exhibits at age 20 for the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in 1970.

The resident artist had just quit, so Wilson figured it was a great chance to work with live animals, a passion born when he was only three and he spotted his first wild animal, a woodchuck, while riding with Mom.

“I made her stop the car,” recalled Wilson, who eventually gained fame as one of the top 10 wildlife artists in the country.

Hours drawing animals

While the other kids were kicking soccer balls and thinking about college, he was spending hours in the library drawing animals from pictures he found in the books.

“Each morning, I would walk down and get to know the animals,” he said as he described his year and half at the Desert Museum, an opportunity each day to study the form and movements of desert creatures.

“I called it my academy of anatomy.”

Though he loved it there and it was steady work, he ached to go out on his own.

“My creativity wasn’t something I could turn on and off,” he said as he recalled how he would just get going on a project at the museum and would have to quit it on the weekends.

He moved to Payson for uninterrupted freedom, working with galleries there, opened a studio in Wisconsin, then back to Tucson, eventually gaining a national reputation, landing him finally in Tubac in 2001, where he and wife Debbe created the Nicholas Wilson Gallery in the Tubac Golf Resort, where he’s featured on the cover of the April Tubac Villager.

He works in public view here, handling only his own pieces, which command thousands from collectors all over the country who are familiar with his incomparable talents with sculpture and gouache (opaque watercolor) paintings, and his attention to detail.

Rendering the fur

Featured in Arizona Highways in 1988 (“The Wildlife Art of Nick Wilson”) as the first artist ever to contribute a painted front cover, Wilson developed a remarkable technique in rendering the fur in his wild animal creations that has taken him forty years to perfect.

All he will say of his secret is that it’s a combination of painted glazes and scratched out surfaces.

When asked how long it takes him to paint a picture, he answers cleverly, “It takes two weeks and 40 years.”

He also does oils as an exercise, he says, so as not to burn out on gouache, since it allows him to delve into bigger, broader brush strokes, but it is his sculpting skills, self-discovered a few years back when he decided to make clay models for subjects to help him see a wider dimension, that generate much of his own excitement in his work nowadays.

12-foot bronze

It’s exciting for others, too, as evidenced by “Wildcat Family,” a nearly 12-foot bronzed piece finished for the Alumni Plaza on the U of A campus in 2004, commissioned by then university president and art collector Peter Likens and funded by alumni and private contributions.

Though Wilson explained that wildcats don’t really form families as such in reality, he did it to symbolize, he said, the cherished relationship between alumni and student body.

He’s currently working on “Natural Flow,” commissioned by the Booth Western Art Museum, one of the top 10 tourist attractions in Northern Georgia.

It will be a 14-foot sculpture depicting a mountain lion and two Native Americans sharing a waterfall.

The museum board had purchased one of his paintings and so flew him to Georgia to discuss a 17-foot-high corner where his work can be viewed looking up and also down from a mezzanine above the sculpture.

“I thought of the mountain lion first,” Wilson explained, “then decided to show both the Indians and the animal together, as they both rely on this natural force (water).”

“I try to, whenever I can, include a mankind element,” he added as he pointed out other paintings hanging in his gallery, many telling a story that illustrate wildlife co-existing with man’s creations.

A member of the Society of Animal Artists, Wilson’s work is featured in magazines and displayed in museums and galleries across North America, including the Cowboy Hall of Fame, the Canadian Museum of Natural Sciences in Quebec, the Smithsonian and National Geographic, as well as the London and Scottish Museums of Natural History.

16,000-square-foot mural

But, his biggest break, he would agree, a major step that put him on the map as an artist, was the opportunity to paint “Jungle World,” a 16,000- square-foot mural for the Bronx Zoo in 1982 that took him two and a half years to complete.

T.S. Eliot once said, “Only those who risk going too far can find out how far they can go,” and for Wilson this was his chance to prove he could do anything with his artistry if he was willing to take that risk.

He never hesitated.

“It broadened my horizons,” he said, as prior to this endeavor he had never shown in major exhibits or galleries or done anything close to this magnitude.

His detail was so impressive, one of the monkeys tried to swing into the five-story wall.

He visited the zoo last June and found his creation still in pristine condition.

New York’s Central Park Zoo had him do a “snowy owls” mural for them not long after, and he soon became one of the most sought-after wildlife artists in the country.

Art lovers know his reputation before they enter the tranquil little studio/gallery in the Tubac Golf Resort where they can watch him make a small rendering in clay from a photo, then recreate the same piece seven times taller, “eyeballing” the finish, finally casting it in bronze.

He and Debbe, who was an art major in college and handles the business end of his work, travel summers so he can do some land and seascapes and photograph wildlife, often creating composite images from several different animals in his mind to launch his next idea.

In the meantime, collectors flock to Wilson’s studio after viewing his museum and gallery pieces in other locales while he ponders the occasional request for commissioned large sculptures, confident and content that, although he has never done anything else, he has never been the stereotypical “starving artist,” a testament to his talent.

“I feel that I’m doing what I always wanted to do.”

Mike Touzeau is a freelance writer.