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Happy 6th Birthday to my youngest child, Gigi.  She is adorable, creative, strong willed, opinionated, precious, colorful and a bit naughty just like the work of artist, Donald Roller Wilson.  I have had a long standing love affair with his work since 1991 when I saw a few pieces in a gallery in Palm Beach, Florida. He is an old masters style painter with a healthy dose of insanity.  I bought his book and was hooked.  The exquisite painting style combined with the silly and crazy characters doing totally inappropriate things is just a fabulous juxtaposition. They will always remind me of Gigi and her beauty mixed with her often inappropriate behavior.

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Here is the full bio of the genius himself from Rive Gauche Gallery. 

Donald Roller Wilson

Donald Roller Wilson takes his inanity seriously. He's so good at it, in fact, that his paintings make Jack Nicholson, Harrison Ford, Paul Simon, Elizabeth Taylor, Steve Martin, Meryl Streep, Carol Burnett, Diane Sawyer, and Carrie Fisher. Nevertheless don't think Roller is about fashionable pop culture: He may be a celebrity artist but his work is also collected by major museums and was a critical standout at The Corcoran Gallery of Art's 41’st Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting.

Houston born and Arkansas-based, Roller is a teller of tales with the unique technique and meticulousness of an old master, animating his paintings with finely wrought clothed chimpanzees, dogs, and cats, wooden matches, asparagus stalks, and cigarette butts. He constructs characters like Jane the Pug Girl, Jack the Jack Russell “Terror, ” Loretta the Actress Cat, and Patricia the Seeing Eye Dog of Houston. The artist's hyper-vivid imagination leaps into fantasies and onto canvases that require an massive amount of time to complete, all done in vibrant detail, redolent of the 16th century Dutch masters. The Washington Post stated “One utterly forgives the painter's self-indulgences for one reason . . . He is technically impeccable.”

Roller Wilson's recognizable works hang in the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn NY; Chicago Art Institute, Chicago, IL; Whitney Museum, New York, New York; Bank of America, San Francisco, CA; and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden- Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

My crazy Gigi…

Happy Birthday Baby!