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Show • ' The art scene <T Sam Wilson's rewarding works entertain at Canyon Gallery By George Dibble When Sam Wilson starts a new canvas there is usually a painterly object near at hand - a quick challenge to his fund of ideas and versatile brush or stylus. From a recent canvas it was a colorful waterfowl decoy. In the white north-light of the studio, the burnished green head and color-Mr. Dibble banded ^ings came alive with splendid reality. From the beginning an entire composition comes alive with images, ideas in a fairly abstract space. Having begun, with interesting things to draw there is no rejection of peripheral levels of interest - a landscape, the illusions of overlapping or collage. In his recording of things there is a middle-ground that hopefully many entertain a varied audience. His works have been rewarding gallery-goers at the Canyon Gallery in Alta. "I do draw things," Wilson says, "trying to please the ghost of Al- /brecht Durer, but then these birds or ducks or rubber fish are thrown metaphorically, about the surface. This is the result of my homage of Jackson Pollock. Artist's Curse "Touching all the bases does not an inside park homerun make. I just can't edit out those other possibilities. The compulsion to throw in most of my visual experience exists and persists. It must be a curse, the artist sharing the same hat with the art lover." The artist considers himself a middle-of-the-roader. "We in the middle of the road often get hit by small cars and large trucks. Still, I do suppose a style can emerge from a closet filled with 5,000 years of ghosts, both quick and quiet. As always, is it real or just an illusion, am I a raving liberal with something to lose or an academician disguised as a clown, cavorting about the left bank, knowing Photo-mat is the most direct solution to the problem?" Teaching and creating, art are parellel interests in Wilson's life. He is adjunct assistant professor in the University of Utah department of art and has taught at Cerritos College, Cerritos, Calif.; Summervail Art Workshop, Vail, Colo.; Santa Monica College, Santa Monica, Calif, and California State University, Long Beach. His professional experience includes work with Paramount Pictures; illustrator for Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" on PBS; illustrator for Surfer and Surfing magazines; state design, construction and silkscreen-ing for "Silent Running," Universal Studios, and special effects for "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Wilson's paintings have been included in one-man and juried shows throughout the country and his work belongs to collections that include the Utah Museum of Fine Arts and the Utah State Institute of Fine Arts Collections. Work Is Insightful His painterly designs flourish with ideas - cogent, realistic, acute - a vital current that moves through a vein of delightful awareness - a wit that rejects nose-thumbing or the quip and is not partial to the frenetic wars of much contemporary brush-wielding. His work is sensibly belonging -. adroit and insightful. Practically anything that is associated with the phenomenon of objects in flight, be it the delicate umbrella parachute of the milkweed |