"La Nature est un temple ou de vivant piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe a travers des forets de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers."

(From Correspondences by Charles Baudelaire)



For Frank Avray Wilson the activity of painting takes place within the overall philosophy which has driven his life. His independence of thought took root early, perhaps in response to feeling an outsider amid the predominantly French society in Mauritius where he was born and spent the first seven years of his life. This period was not particularly happy and had as its backdrop the tales of Voodoo magic which he imbibed from those taking care of him as well as the wider threat of World War I, in which both his maternal uncles were killed, and the later tragedy of his elder brother's sudden illness and death in early manhood. Whilst Avray Wilson claims no affection for Mauritius now - "The landscape is rather futile" - he spent a great deal of his childhood out of doors, fascinated by insects, flowers and beautiful tree lizards with their green and turquoise tails. There were, too, brightly plumed birds; colours in flight. Crucially, it was the start of his deep love of minerals and crystals, a passion which sustains him today - "Whenever I feel depressed, I pick one up and look at it" - and which alerted him to the underlying patterns and structures in the natural world. The shock of boarding school in England did nothing to dislodge his deep feelings for nature (the microscope revealed fresh layers of "throbbing" existence for exploration) and he resolved to be either a doctor or a naturalist. In 1932 he went to Cambridge to read Biology.

At University, Avray Wilson continued to paint, as he had done since childhood, influenced by his mother and sister, both of whom were amateur watercolourists. Holidays to the family home in France provided an introduction to the Impressionists but it was the paintings of Vlaminck which first signalled to Avray Wilson the direction his own work might take. His early painting had been representational but at Cambridge, partly triggered by working on academic drawings for a scientist researching tissue growth, he began to use geometric forms and passed through a period of spiritual and intellectual turmoil in which uncertainty about the philosophical basis of his scientific studies was interwoven with a profound questioning of the purpose of painting and the issues which it sought to address. In both fields the path he had so far followed failed to encompass the forces which he perceived to be the ignition of life itself. From this confrontation emerged the embryonic belief system which has fed his life ever since and which finds its expression in his paintings and in the books he has written to elaborate his convictions. Whilst he has been a full-time painter since leaving Cambridge, he continues to be an avid reader of scientific theory, finding many of his deductions corroborated by recent developments.

Avray Wilson's belief in a transcendental reality remains an act of faith - and an isolating one - but it has a distinguished ancestry among philosophers and poets. The credo behind his paintings perhaps explains the feeling that they articulate something sensed by not fully seen. They seem more airbound than earthbound, less about the relationships struck up when paint is confined within a given area of canvas than about documenting a living structure in a moment of transition, an eruption whose extent is bounded by invisible natural laws. Whilst there is clearly a celebration of colour, the work is not primarily about the relationships between colours any more than it is about representation or abstraction. Finding that pure geometric forms were to some extent 'dead' shapes, Avray Wilson was sensing his own vocabulary by the 1950s.

Despite his rejection of the primary geometric symbols, the main body of Avray Wilson's paintings is sustained by an innate sense of structure, the various elements frequently bonded together by an armature of black lines, often with a strong shape giving force to the centre or near-centre of the work, the underlying unity of the various elements confirmed by the broad margins of related colour which surround them. By these means, Avray Wilson suggests not disintegration but rather movement towards an uncertain next stage. After a practice of sixty years, the marriage of form and vitality remains the key: "I wanted form and I wanted to make it live. It's very difficult to create form spontaneously. The form has to arise and you may catch it if it's there. Usually it doesn't happen and then I destroy the painting. But when it happens, there's no doubt about it. It's a question of correspondence, of intuition, of guidance. In any creative occupation - writing, music, painting - you can experience a receptive state. The whole thing is to let randomness take over; but randomness has to be guided. You manage intuitively to put the symbols down. Analogies are all we have really."

Avray Wilson has remained an outsider for most of his life, largely through choice, although in the 1950s he acknowledged brief links with Tachisme and with the CoBrA group. These years also included a brief association with Denis Bowen (whom Avray Wilson had met through the Free Painters Group) when they founded and ran the New Vision Gallery together. From 1956 onwards, Avray Wilson was represented in London by The Redfern Gallery but in the 1970s he withdrew from exhibiting and became increasingly reclusive, seeking to concentrate on the definition of his beliefs, both in words and in paint. The intervening years - again marked by personal tragedy - have deepened rather than dented his convictions.


Cathy Courtney, 1995 (from Frank Avray Wilson - An Exhibition of Recent Paintings and Work from the 50s to 80s, The Redfern Gallery, 1995)

Quotations taken from the National Life Story Collection's recording with Frank Avray Wilson, which can be heard at the National Sound Archive and the Tate Gallery Archive.