The Landscape Remembers: In Conversation with Painter Georg Wilson
By Keshav AnandLondon-based painter Georg Wilson’s practice is rooted in the rhythms of nature, paying homage to English folklore, and pastoral traditions of poetry and art. Responding to the seasons, she creates richly textured, atmospheric landscapes that exist beyond the human realm, inhabited instead by wildling creatures that live in harmony with the land. Through swirling, layered brushstrokes, Wilson conjures a world where nature flourishes free from ownership and extraction, offering a nostalgic yet otherworldly vision of the countryside. On the occasion of her latest exhibition, The Last Oozings, now on view at Pilar Corrias, Something Curated’s Keshav Anand spoke with the artist.
Keshav Anand: How do you choose the titles for your shows?
Georg Wilson: My titles come from English poetry, often from the same period as the artists that are inspiring the work. A couple of years ago when I was interested in 15th and 16th century British painting, Holbein and Nicholas Hilliard, I would glean titles from Tudor love poems. For this body of work, I’ve been looking at the Pre-Raphaelites, Samuel Palmer, and reading John Clare and Keats’ poems on nature.
KA: I’m curious to learn more about the influence of John Keats’ poem on this exhibition.
GW: The title comes from Keats’ To Autumn (1820) – The Last Ooozings encapsulates all the warm wetness of autumn, when the countryside is overripe and nature is rotting down into the soil. The poem really conveys a heaviness, everything is in a state of transformation, when the cycle of nature is nearing its end. The surface of these paintings ooze, they have a wet look from the medium I use. My colour palette has shifted too, oozing with saturated tones: pinky oranges against sludgy greens and bright yellow light.
KA: Your work is deeply intertwined with the seasons. Do you have a favourite time of the year?
GW: I love each season in England and its idiosyncrasies. I started these paintings in late summer and you can see a progression in the palette and subject matter as I worked through to winter. Dappled sunshine filtering through thick green foliage, then intense reds and browns, and finally muted twilight and dark, bare tree branches. I’m interested in the subtle, pale colours of winter light at the moment: lemon yellow, greys and lilacs, paired with the rich black-browns as nature dies down.
KA: When you are building the worlds in your paintings, do you start with some kind of story or narrative, or is your process more organic?
GW: My paintings are glimpses into an imagined realm that I will never see the whole of. I work on a few at once, and they naturally seem to connect to each other as they develop. I relate to what Alan Garner says about world-building, that ‘the imaginative [artist] is more strictly confined than is the observer.’ An image or a feeling might stir while I’m reading, walking outside, or in a dream, but first I have to be primed with observational drawings, walks, my postcard collection, botanical manuscripts and books.
KA: The oak tree plays a central role in The Last Oozings. Why did you choose the oak as a keystone for this exhibition?
GW: WH Auden said that ‘a culture is no better than its woods.’ Before beginning this body of work, I collected 19th century England engravings of notable oak trees, many of which are no longer standing. I was initially drawn to these prints for their billowing foliage shapes – mementos of long-gone trees – but on further reflection I noticed that the oaks were often depicted alone in private parkland. These images are part of the legacy of enclosures in the countryside, the appropriation of common land by upper classes which deprived people of their traditional rights of access and use. The engravings are souvenirs of oak trees that watched as the landscape underwent immense political change.
The oak is a potent symbol in English history and folklore, imbued with the magic of an ancient unknowable landscape. As the tallest tree in the forest, the oak is the guardian of the woodland and they were considered sacred in old Norse and Celtic culture. Oak canopies and trunks support an abundance of lifeforms such as bats, birds and insects, including many species that are threatened by environmental change and industrialised farming. When drawing outside, I’m attracted to the forms within oak trees, their rounded cloudy canopies and bulbous trunks.
KA: What are you listening to in the studio at the moment?
GW: I find music emotionally distracting while I’m painting, it alters my pace too much. I prefer to be slightly zoned-out to the sound of people talking. I’m currently listening to an Ursula Le Guin audiobook, Gifts, and a dramatisation of Robert Macfarlane’s Ness.
KA: Aside from home, where do you like to eat in London?
GW: Mien Tay on the Kingsland Road and Café TPT in Chinatown. Rochelle Canteen for special occasions.
KA: And what are you currently reading?
GW: The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk.
Feature image: Georg Wilson, The Wet (After Ophelia), 2024. Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London