Donald Roller Wilson

Donald Roller Wilson (born 1938) is an American artist, known for his paintings of people and anthropomorphized chimpanzees, orangutans, cats, and dogs, set in southern gothic interiors, twilight forests, and nocturnal graveyards, often amidst complex still lifes or floral arrangements, with levitating pickles, olives, asparagus, wooden matches, and cigarette butts.

His family moved to Nebraska about 1944 where his father started a business that made combine harvesters, and then to Wichita, Kansas, in 1945.

[6] The artist has written about his work stating – The dreams of my waking hours are superimposed against an almost unbroken background of imagery.

For there is some forming process accompanying me which sweeps like a selective magnet across an utter chaos of patterns in my thinking, and the result is that an otherwise aimless flow of association–of mental wanderings–becomes documented.

I can say with absolute truth and authority that I am a bystander, and the things that stream together in my work set up a kind of subconscious existence of their own.