PETER EDGERTON WILSON

Artist, art critic, Sixties radical, mentor
Born in Toronto December 11, 1937
Died in Toronto November 7, 2006, of sepsis syndrome, aged 68

Judith Clute and Karen Montesanto and Susan Crean

There’s a story about Peter Wilson, still recited by veterans of Shawnigan Lake School in British Columbia, which Peter attended in his teens. It has to do with the school’s cook and the writing of an insulting note. The cook didn’t speak English, so Peter was pressed by his pals to try writing it in Chinese. He’d been studying the language for some time, having a particular interest in calligraphy. Now he applied his imagination to being rude in Chinese.

Wilson was eventually caught, his dictionaries confiscated. This naturally cemented a lifelong interest in China. But the prank also foreshadowed the life to come, the career in solitary pursuit of knowledge, the superb gift for drawing, the facility with language, and the irreverence.

In the late sixties, when he returned to Canada from his studies in Chicago, Wilson became active on the left in the nationalist movement then sweeping Canada. He joined the Canadian Liberation Movement in Toronto, working on the movement’s newspaper New Canada and acting as a key adviser to Barry Lord during the writing of The History of Painting in Canada: Toward a People’s Art. At the same time, Wilson was freelancing as an art critic and illustrator, writing the art column at the Toronto Star.

Artists were on the move in the early seventies, banding together to set up video co-ops, artist-run galleries, magazine collectives, and unions. Wilson soon became involved with the organizing effort behind Canadian Artists Representation, working alongside people such as John Boyle, Joyce Wieland, and Charlie Pachter. He was an astute political analyst and rhetorical genius who could sum up complex issues in simple sentences. “Most people work in order to make a living, but artists make a living in order to work,” he once remarked, which pretty much explains the economics of art-making.

Peter Wilson was an eclectic intellectual; a politico who read Suetonius as well as Marx; an artist with no illusions about the art world; a virtuoso draughtsman (as adept at silverpoint as numismatics) who could grind his own colours. He studied at the École de Beaux Arts in Montréal and the Art Institute in Chicago, but his major break came when he and Judith Clute apprenticed with two European painters, Françoise André and Charles Stegeman, who came to Canada after the Second World War and taught at the Banff School of Fine Arts. This was when Wilson decided on a life in art. Judith remembers watching him doing riffs on Francis Bacon’s screaming Pope, drawing like da Vinci and then like Ingres; it was all elegance and energy in wild balance.

Through the seventies and eighties, Wilson continued to paint, although he rarely exhibited. He and Susan Crean lived for a decade in the Junction, and then he moved to Karen Montesanto’s on McCaul Street, a stone’s throw from King Lee apartments where it all began in the sixties with a moveable feast of artists and travellers. He spent time with Vancouver sculptor Bob Foley, striking coins the old way — with die and mallet — crafting exquisite portraits of friends. He was a great friend to younger artists; some, like Texas writer/photographer Mary Lou Pilkington, visited regularly for decades.

In later years, Peter would occasionally remark to close friends that he figured his life’s contribution would not be anything he himself created but rather the people he “created” — by which he meant the artists he helped launch. This was Peter’s special gift. He could recognize talent, often before anyone else did, and he knew how to encourage the artist in others. In the end, a powerful legacy.

Artists Judith Clute and Karen Montesanto and writer Susan Crean are friends of Peter Wilson.

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