Pamela Wilson’s Haunting Oil, Gold Leaf Paintings

Painter Pamela Wilson pushes her absorbing, eerie imagery with a mixture of oils and gold leaf, crafting shimmering images of isolated subjects. Wilson’s paintings stir in the often off-kilter expressions of her subjects and overall otherworldliness of the setting. Wilson is part of a new show at Australia’s beinArt Gallery. “Jamais Vu” pairs the artist’s work with Kit King and Oda, a husband and wife duo that collaborates on oil paintings.




In these new paintings, the oddity and absorbing beauty of each subject is punctuated with sparse objects and creatures that surround them. The appearance of birds around a child, for example, can seem at once sweet and strange. “She develops haunting images which create a remarkably compelling narrative,” a statement says. “The physical and emotional isolation of her characters has emerged as a hallmark of her work, as she explores the great chasm of the psyche, the abyss that opens when you seek to understand the complex human in modernity.”



Wilson is an MFA graduate of University of California, Santa Barbara, where she received various honors. Since she began to exhibit on a regular basis since the early 1990s, she’s had more than 20 solo shows.