How My Painting Got Into a Tokyo Museum
Outdoor Painter Website September 3, 2019:
Keith Wicks shares the delightful story of how he discovered his work on display in Japan.
By Keith Wicks
On our recent trip to Japan, my family and I visited the Ghibli Museum, a museum designed and dedicated to famed animator Hayao Miyazaki. My son, Dash, who now lives in Tokyo with his wife, Hinako, purchased tickets six weeks ahead of our visit. This was a must because of how popular the museum is in Tokyo. You can spend hours or more at the Ghibli.
The permanent exhibit room, which is a recreation of Hayao studio, is a room filled with drawings, paintings, all kinds of gadgets, an old stove, and two drawing tables. When we entered, my wife, Terry, nudged me and pointed out a painting on the wall, saying, “There’s your painting.”
“The Old Green Truck” painting above a table in the permanent exhibit room.
My work, “The Old Green Truck,” was hanging above the drawing table. I couldn’t believe that it was my painting, so I leaned over the rope to see my signature.
I was amazed that old green truck had found a home in the Ghibli museum. Even my daughter, Walker, said, “Wow, Dad, that’s cool!”
You never know where your painting will show up.
The painting was purchased by John and Nancy Lasseter back in 2005 as a gift to Hayao as a memento of a trip to Sonoma. I did meet Hayao and was told he is the Walt Disney of Japan. John later told me that the work was hanging in his studio. I had forgotten about “The Old Green Truck” until the visit to the Ghibli Museum. It made my trip and my year. The Ghibli Museum opened in 2001. If you’re ever in Japan, this is worth a visit.
https://www.outdoorpainter.com/how-my-painting-tokyo-museum/
The World Aglow
Southwest Art June 2008:
Keith Wicks- The World Aglow
By Gretchen Reynolds
Two years ago, Keith Wicks decided that he needed to expand his horizons. At the time, he was living and painting in Sonoma, CA, a fine location for a painter, especially one who does so much plein-air work. With its limpid light and rolling hills, Sonoma look like parts of Italy, Wicks says: “It’s a gorgeous, inspiring, wonderful place.”
But after more than 10 years living there, he was feeling vaguely restless, suspecting that, to further his art, he needed to spend time exploring different worlds, different lights, and different sensibilities. So he did what few artists before him have thought to do: He solicited investors, each of whom agreed to help fund a year-long, around-the-world painting expedition, an immersion in plein-air artistry so ambitious that even Wicks was a little overwhelmed. “It was a big project that kept getting bigger,” he says.
It was also, for him, eye-opening and energizing. “I could go anywhere, paint anything,” he says. He completed a large oil of Paris’ famed Notre Dame Cathedral, as seen from inside a restaurant across the street, which allowed him to experiment with shadows and twilight. He wandered through Europe and Asia photographing and sketching street scenes. He worked large and small. And in the end, he had 100 completed oils that not only repaid his investors (with considerable interest) but also reinvigorated his art. Today, back in Sonoma, the 49-year-old artist finds the days too short for all he wants to paint. He says his idea list for the subjects and places he hopes to capture on canvas is already too long for one lifetime. “And I keep adding to it constantly,” he says.
SOUTH OF FRANCE, OIL, 16 X 20.
Wicks was born into a large family in Northern California with no particular tradition of artistic talent but with considerable acceptance of it. Encouraged by his parents, Wicks was always sketching and painting as a child. One of these early efforts, hung at a furniture store in Bakersfield, sold when he was 11. “I was launched as an artist,” Wicks laughs.
There were, of course, hurdles along the way. Money, for one. “My family wasn’t wealthy,” Wicks says, so after leaving high school, he had to support himself. While still in his late teens, he turned to advertising, designing logos and painting the sides of race cars. He also had attended the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, but left after several years to concentrate on advertising work full time. With a partner, he opened an agency and soon had a raft of California celebrity clients. The agency was bustling and successful.
But Wicks wasn’t really happy. “I felt like the advertising work was taking me away from the creative side,” he says. “It wasn’t really what I wanted to be doing.” So he sold his stake, moved to the Bay Area, and began working in the multimedia entertainment industry. “It wasn’t quite fine art,” he says, “but it was closer.” The work involved designing storyboards, working on commercials, and completing projects for George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic. Meanwhile, he painted. “I did a series of teapots. I also did a series of waiters,” he recalls. “I was kind of tip-toeing toward my true subjects”—which would eventually involve elaborate recreations of street scenes with hovering waiters at outdoor tables, lambent light, and sometimes, somewhere in the background, a teapot.
BROOKLYN BRIDGE, OIL, 24 X 36
But first, he had to actually become a full-time painter. That required a final leap of faith. “I knew that if I remained in the Bay Area, I’d find it hard to disentangle myself from the entertainment industry,” he says. “The directors kept calling.”
By then, Wicks and his wife, like so many Californians before them, had felt the pull of Sonoma. They’d visited, loved it, thought it would be a fine place to raise their daughter, and by sheer good fortune, found a home in the early 1990s that was in their price range. So Wicks took a deep breath, told all the clamoring directors he was moving, and relocated his family to the wine country. He also reinvented himself as a full-time fine artist.
Today, a Keith Wicks oil is immediately recognizable, less for its subject matter than for its luminosity. “I want my paintings to glow,” Wicks says. “I want the colors to look lit from within.” Achieving this radiance has required years of experimentation and work. It has also required long hours in the field—sometimes in the wind, the beating sun, and the chilly hours just as the sun rises or sets.
OFF THE BEATEN PATH, OIL, 24 X 36
Wicks starts most of his paintings with plein-air sessions, though not all of his works are completed outside. “I like to work large sometimes,” he says, noting that you simply can’t finish a large painting outdoors before the light, and therefore the scene itself, changes. “I paint fast, but even I’m not fast enough to finish a 4-by-5-foot canvas in the field,” says Wicks. “The light is so transient. It changes moment by moment.”
And light is, after all, the foundation of his work. The street scenes for which he’s renowned aren’t so much about the people or the charismatically crumbling plaster on the wall of an old restaurant. The paintings are about the light as it moves through that scene, the light as it glints off that wall, the light as it illuminates the laughing diners. His work is a study in how the world glows.
“Everything I do is drenched with light,” Wicks says. “I’m not particularly concerned with the subjects themselves. I want a mood, a romanticism. I want the light itself to have texture.” In the process, he makes that street-side café or wandering alley or corner bakery appear to be the most enticing spot on earth. Such easy romanticism doesn’t come easily, of course. It requires sophisticated, formal technique. It also requires, for Wicks, a stringently limited palette. Beauty, for him, is about restraint.
SUNNY AFTERNOON ITALY, OIL, 14 X 11
How can a painter achieve such beguiling, naturalistic effects with a palette of barely eight colors? “I use very transparent paint,” Wicks says, with an emphasis on yellows, ocher, raw sienna, titanium white, and sap green. He’ll use a spot of cadmium red in almost every painting, but few of his other paints are so vivid. “I can mix almost every color I need using just the eight colors on my palette,” he says. “I avoid charcoals, because I don’t want any muddiness. I want clarity.”
Wicks’ painting technique is loose, fast, “almost slap-dash,” he says, using the term proudly. “I have spent 15 years trying to loosen up from the tight, photorealistic work that I produced for advertising clients. I’ve had to teach myself to let my brush strokes flow.”
The result is a kind of impressionistic realism that owes less to pure verisimilitude than to mood, much like the work of John Singer Sargent and Johannes Vermeer, two of his inspirations. “I don’t try to paint things exactly as they are,” Wicks says. “I paint things as I want them to be. I paint them as I see them in my mind’s eye, with gentle nods to reality.”
SONOMA AFTERNOON, OIL, 11 X 14
He might, then, during one of his regular scouting drives around Sonoma’s countryside, notice a particularly striking hillside tree, grab the plein-air painting equipment he always carries in his car, and settle himself and his easel before the tree to start painting. But the blue sky that actually exists in the scene? In his final painting, it might become an achingly expressive yellow ocher, lit with the rays of a twilight that hasn’t even begun. “My plein-air paintings tend to be a little closer to the exact scene than my studio paintings,” Wicks says. But even in his plein-air work, he says, he puts himself and his sensibilities into the scene. “Nothing I paint is an exact representation of what I see,” he says. “If I wanted to do that, I’d just take photos. My paintings are always, in the end, about mood, about a certain warm romanticism.”
These days, still bursting with inspiration from his around-the-world trip, Wicks paints virtually every day, for hours, in the studio next to his Sonoma home. In his few spare moments, he managed to organize the wildly successful Sonoma Plein Air Foundation and its annual festival and competition, which benefit arts education in the public schools of Sonoma. He’s also started a sister plein-air festival in Telluride, CO, and a new Napa Valley Art Festival. The administration of so many festivals can be “a bit tiring,” he says wistfully. “But I lead a life of such good fortune, I feel like I have to do something to give back.” And in the process he increases, at least a little, the world’s glow.
Featured in June 2008
https://www.southwestart.com/articles-interviews/featured-artists/a_world_aglow
Year of Living Artfully
MetroActive 2006 Fall Arts Issue:
Year of Living Artfully
One Year, One Show treats one painter as one (hell of an) investment
By Jordan E. Rosenfeld
When did the act of patronage, in which an artist is commissioned to do good work for good wages, stop being commonplace? Possibly right after Michelangelo finished the Sistine Chapel. North Bay artists might want to take note: A new concept in patronage, created by a Bay Area business investor to support one artist for one year, could inspire a renaissance of its very own.
Darius Anderson, founder and partner of Kenwood Investments, has an art collector's eye and the courage of a venture capitalist. Anderson is known for an eclectic range of investment projects; he has dabbled in projects ranging from the redevelopment of Treasure Island to the purchase of the Aquarium of the Bay in San Francisco. In 2004, when Anderson, a Sonoman, was introduced to the work of painter Keith Wicks, founder of the Sonoma Plein Air Foundation, another unusual investment idea took shape in his mind.
"Keith told me about a problem he was having with several of his galleries, and how they had not paid him in a timely manner," Anderson says by phone from his San Francisco office. "In one situation, he had to fly to Chicago to demand a check, and even then they paid him in installments. I thought that was awful, and I said, 'Why don't we think about putting together a little investment group to support you?'"
The result is One Year, One Show, an unusual patronage program devised by Anderson and supported by an eclectic cluster of seven colleagues, people he calls "luminaries and bigwigs." They include Mark Emmerson, the CEO of Sierra Pacific Lumber; Linda Reiff, executive director of the Napa Valley Vintners Association; a New York-based Wall Street trader; and four others. (Anderson is quick to point out that the investors put up personal funds that were not connected to or sponsored by their place of employment.)
Lifestyle Investment
Most savvy investors have a common approach: they are loath to part with their cash until they're reassured that their investment has the power to deliver. Anderson's plan was to raise $200,000. This sum would support Wicks for a year, allow him to buy supplies and provide for international travel so that he would have many new sights and experiences to inspire him. In return, Wicks had to agree to forgo any standing gallery arrangements while creating 100 saleable works of art.
While Anderson had faith in Wicks' work, he and his wife Sarah couldn't foot the bill alone; he needed seven people to each invest $25,000 for a total of $200,000. They had to be willing to trust that Wicks could create 100 pieces in just 12 months time and they had to be willing to trust that all 100 of those pieces were "saleable," a laughably slippery concept in the art world.
In addition to supporting Wicks, some of the $200,000 would go to arranging social gatherings among the investors. This last is perhaps the most daring of the plan's many components. Anderson, a professional risk-taker, banked on what he calls a "lifestyle investment." His concept, developed after many conversations with Wicks, was not just to support the artist, but to allow the investors to participate in Wicks' artistic process by joining him on trips to Mexico, Paris, New Orleans and New York.
If Anderson was worried about attracting enough investors, his fears were quickly allayed. "We sent out 15 e-mails to people we knew, and got so many immediate responses that we had to turn people away," he chuckles.
There is a waiting list of interested investors for the next round.
Advertiser Links
San Francisco.com Real Estate
Moving to the Bay Area just became easy. Let San Francisco.com show you all the homes currently for sale.
San Jose.com Real Estate
Relocating to San Jose or Silicon Valley? Let San Jose.com introduce you to some expert area real estate agents.
Ten-Grand Man
The year went exactly as Anderson planned. With the freedom to work and not worry about sales or business, Wicks was able to produce more than 100 paintings, effectively creating a yearlong biography of his artistic process. The result will be shown in a two-day exhibit Sept. 16-17 at Building One on Treasure Island. Anderson anticipates that sales will be healthy.
"The first $200,000 will go to pay back the investors," he explains, already divvying up Wicks' worth. "After that, all revenue from the works in this show will be split 50-50 between Keith and the investors."
"I wanted to prove that this could work," he continues. "I knew that in terms of a lifestyle experience it would be successful; many investors have never had this level of access to an artist. It's been fun for them because they now understand the process of what an artist goes through in the creation of an actual piece of art. And on the level of financial return, I'm confident that it will pay off. If we can return just $10,000 to each person in addition to their initial investment, that would be a huge return compared to the stock market or other kinds of investment. I have great confidence in the quality of Keith's work that this will happen."
Whitney Black is special projects manager for Kenwood Investments and has been an integral part of the administrative side of the project.
"For me, being a part of this has felt like a Renaissance revival, like when the Medici family invested in artists," she says by phone from her San Francisco office. "To have an experiential component to an investment is great; there is no price that can be set on that piece of it. Plus, the investors were excited to get a first look at Wicks' collection and to see the results of the couple of trips they personally took with him."
Anderson adds with a chuckle, "The whole concept of breaking down the traditional gallery structure was very satisfying to me. Galleries don't pay up front; an artist creates a body of work, brings it in and then, after they sell, he gets maybe 40 percent--that is, when they get around to paying him."
Free fall: During the year of his patronage, Wicks experimented with larger canvases and changing themes.
Not-So-Starving Artist
Keith Wicks is by no means a starving artist. He has enjoyed national TV and magazine coverage of his work, and was instrumental in creating the nonprofit Sonoma Plein Air Foundation in 2002. Wicks has been painting most of his life, though his art degree is in illustration. He supported himself and family for many years by making storyboards for media, even doing a stint at Industrial Light & Magic, and as a freelance artist, he says, for "every big ad agency in San Francisco."
"It's only the last 10 years that I have been making a living [as a painter]," Wicks says. "I worked in the multimedia industry and I taught at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, but eventually I knew I wanted to get away from it all and just paint. I got out of that business entirely and moved to Sonoma, where I set up a studio."
The Foundation sponsors an event each year in which artists from all over the country come to paint in Sonoma for a week. (This year's event is slated for Sept. 4-10.) Of the nearly 500 applications received each year, only 40 are invited to participate. Each artist creates 10 to 15 paintings in the week's time and submits his or her best piece to a "best in show" juried event, culminating in a gala event on the Friday at the end of the week. The artwork is then auctioned off.
"Sixty percent goes back to the artists, and 40 percent is distributed to the elementary schools, the community center and the Sonoma Valley Museum's Art Rewards for Students program," Wicks says with obvious pride. "Last year, we put $120,000 back into the arts in Sonoma.
"It took a couple years for it to get off the ground, but now it's really successful," he continues. "Then I was approached to start a similar one in Telluride, Colorado, which I did."
Art Biz
Wicks' business-minded approach as much as his painting style is what sold Darius Anderson on creating the investment concept on his behalf. And Wicks himself is satisfied with the result.
"I think that is an unusual opportunity for art collectors to see [a full year's work]," Wicks says. "I've grown tremendously in this year, because painting takes on a kind of momentum when you can do it uninterrupted. The more you paint, the better you get. The amount of concentration I was able to give to my painting really changed my work, and I think that this will be visible in the show when you look at the early paintings versus the ones done later in the year."
Wicks' painting style has been favorably compared to Edward Hopper, though his canvases evoke more obvious emotion than Hopper's austere settings and simple colors.
"It's an honor to be compared to Hopper," he says, "but I think if you look at my work you can also see the influences of painters like Sargent, Saroyan and other traditional painters who had a little bravado to their style and paint reality in an impressionistic way.
"There's a certain twilight that I like and am often looking for," he says. "I like to paint moods. I lean toward realistic scenes, but I skew everything to a more romantic feeling through light. I paint with a transparent oil that has a lot of varnish in it. This lets the light pass through the oil and gives it a kind of luminosity. When it's lit up, many of my paintings really do glow."
Wicks admits that he had to have a certain stamina and disposition to be able to do the sheer amount of work that the year required of him. "I spoke to some of my other artist friends who are in my same league and a lot of them said, 'I don't know if I could pull that off. What about the pressure? What if you fail?'"
Wicks chose not to dwell on failure, but rather to glory in the fullness of experience that the year gave him.
"I had the freedom to paint and create anything I wanted," he exults. "Under normal circumstances, I am under financial pressure each month to supply galleries with what they're asking for and to attend to the business end of things, which takes up most of my time."
With the investors' financial support, Wicks was able to paint much larger canvases than he would normally opt for, producing a number of 6-foot-by-8-foot paintings. He also did far more in-studio painting, instead of the swifter plein air style, which is done in the open air of a natural setting and in a short period of time to capture a specific time of day or mood.
Wick says that the best part is that he now feels he has leverage to begin setting higher prices and getting his work into higher-end galleries.
"This experience was like a catapult. I wanted to raise the level and value of my work, and I feel that I've been able to do that."
Cottage industry: Trained as an illustrator, Wicks cofounded the Sonoma Plein Air Foundation in 2002.
Love and Money
While the investors interviewed agreed that they are not art collectors in any serious way, they got involved because they were sold on the energy of Anderson's enthusiasm and Wicks' past work.
Linda Reiff says that she and her husband, Richard Ward, "fell in love" with Wicks' work when they saw a show of his in San Francisco. When Anderson asked them if they were interested in supporting the concept, she says they jumped at the chance.
"We definitely have an interest and appreciation for the arts, and have made a few minor purchases. My husband was very active and an initial contributor to the di Rosa Preserve and is on their board," Reiff says from her Napa office. "What really drew us to Keith's work is that his paintings are very much of place; they're so vivid and real. My husband and I are both in the wine business, which is also a business of place. The first exhibit we went to was his work of Cuba, which is where my husband and I were married, so we had an immediate connection."
Mark Emmerson of Redding found a different allure. "What attracted me to the project was the people. I'm not sure investing is the right term," he says. "I mean, we invested in the arts and in the artist, but most of us liked the other investors Darius brought together, and Keith's artwork was fantastic. My wife and my tastes are simple, and as I'm getting older, I'm coming to appreciate art more."
Emmerson and his wife Marisa were drawn to Wicks' work because it is "warm, has energy and is positive," he says. "Keith paints places I would like to go to. And he makes a scene look a certain way with light that is inviting and makes you feel good."
Emmerson says that he was surprised by what developed among the group of investors. "The most enjoyable thing was the memories we have of the folks we participated with, who are a wonderfully warm group of people. We had some great dinners where we'd argue and carouse and have a great time. It's a passionate group."
Like Emmerson, Reiff and her husband enjoyed the social aspect of the business relationship. "Not many of us knew each other in advance of the project," she says, "but the relationships we built will definitely continue. We had a great camaraderie, and the time we've been able to spend getting to know Keith and his insights and views and artwork has been extremely rewarding."
Color Me Green
Even though the financial return on the investment is still in question until the Treasure Island show in September, Anderson considers the concept a success already. Ideally, he hopes they will make close to $500,000 when the show is done, pay back everyone's investment and give Wicks a return on his year of hard work. Anderson is also gearing up for a second round. This time, Wicks will be one of the investors and will head up the selection process to choose the next artist.
"I'm on the board of directors for the California Artists Club, and I know hundreds of artists," Wicks says. "We'll hand-pick one based on the work, their professionalism and [their feasibility] from an investment standpoint. It comes down to the quality of work and its potential for longevity. We have to be pretty selective."
In the end, Wicks is glad he had those early conversations with Anderson.
"I feel very fortunate," he grins. "It's been a fantastic year."
'One Year, One Show: A Keith Wicks' Collection' exhibits Saturday-Sunday, Sept. 16-17, at Building One on Treasure Island. Exhibit open to the public, 10am-5pm; opening reception, Sept. 16, 6-8pm. RSVP necessary for reception. 415.955.1100, ext. 105.
Link:
http://www.metroactive.com/bohemian/08.23.06/art-patronage-0634.html