Scottie Wilson left school at the age of nine. He remained semiliterate, although later he would become a loquacious conversationalist. In World War I, he saw battle on the Western Front. He joined the notorious Black and Tan forces in Ireland, and then he made off to Canada, possibly as a deserter disgusted by the horrors that he had witnessed. In 1935, he was living in Toronto and dealing in junk. His art calling took root when he doodled with a pen on a table. During two days, he produced a surface teeming with weird faces, droll creatures, and ornamental patterns. Among his most famous pictured themes are sea birds, ducks, fishes, flowers, totem, and self-portraits. Wilson’s father was a skilled taxidermist, which might explain both his grotesque hybridization and omnipresent cross-hatching technique (with its tendon-like aesthetic) in his works. He described the male faces with large noses that he frequently depicted as “greedies,” corrupt and criminal destroyers of all goodness.

Adapted by Valérie Rousseau from “Scottie Wilson” by Roger Cardinal in The Hidden Art (New York: Skira Rizzoli/American Folk Art Museum, 2017), 108–111. Exhibition label for Memory Palaces: Inside the Collection of Audrey B. Heckler. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2020.