Timothy Wilson Featured in National Geographic
Jenn Singer artist Timothy Wilson was recently featured in a National Geographic article highlighting his process as a plein air landscape painter.
Written by Katy Kelleher with photography by Greta Rybus, the article, Want to take better travel photos? Think like a landscape painter, covers Wilson’s process of creating a commissioned body of landscape oil paintings for the Maine Coast Heritage Trust.
Read an excerpt below - the full article can be found here.
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
June 30, 2021
BY KATY KELLEHER
PHOTOGRAPHS BY GRETA RYBUS
The land doesn’t demand your attention the way billboards do, or traffic lights, or people with their bright clothes and private thoughts. Landscapes aren’t static, but they’re not as fast-moving as the rest of our world. Even urban landscapes, with their ever-present teardowns and build-ups, backdrop most of the art we consume, from films to photographs. But if you stop and focus, as landscape painters do, there’s depth in the world around us and stories unfolding in the foliage, the soil, even in the garbage.
Landscape painters see the world differently than most travelers do. Their eyes have been trained to seek the horizon, read the light, and understand subtle variations in weather.
It’s part of the job, explains painter Timothy Wilson. For the past two years, he’s been working on a series of images inspired by the landscapes of Maine Coast Heritage Trust. He’s visited over a dozen of the trust’s nature preserves on the Maine coast, painting on cliffs, islands, in marshes and bogs—even from the seat of his kayak.
He experiences the parks the way any traveler might, eyes open to the wonder of the rugged landscape. But instead of snapping a photo for Instagram, Wilson stops and sets up an easel. “It stops me from looking at my phone,” he says. “Instead of checking again and again, I look at the landscape. I become enmeshed. It feels wonderful.”