Ernest Wilmeth II : Artist

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Ernest Wilmeth was born in 1952 in a small town in the Texas panhandle. Upon high school graduation he enrolled as a business major at West Texas State University in Canyon, Texas. A trip to Santa Fe, NM with his parents in his late teens left an indelible impression on him as they browsed the art galleries. The thought of actually being a painter never left his mind.

In 1974 Wilmeth enrolled in a two week art course in Cloudcroft, NM to experience and see firsthand if the possibility of being an artist was realistic. "At the end of the first week I thought it possible." Within a week of leaving Cloudcroft he left to enroll at Northern Arizona University as a painting major where he received his BFA in 1976. Upon graduation from NAU he returned to Texas for three years then left and moved to New Mexico where the art climate was alive and thriving. "I knew I was in trouble in Texas when writing a check at a store and the clerk would ask me what I did and when I told them I was an artist they would look down their nose at me and say, "Is that 'all' you do." Conversely, in New Mexico people would get excited to discover you were an artist and want to know all about the work."

Wilmeth painted traditional oils and watercolors for ten years and in the interim took a ceramic class from 1982-85. It was during this period that he began experimenting withs smoke-fired clay vessels. It later became a signature style for the artist.

In 1995 he returned to two-dimensional work in the form of collages. And in 1999 introduced even more simplified works on canvas and paper of copper, silver, or gold leaf, sometimes with color but usually on a black ground.

"Artists whose work I've admired include Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Paul Cezanne, Robert Rauchenberg, Edward Hopper, Mark Rothko, Ruth Duckworth and Adolf Gottlieb."

The artist lives and works in Albuquerque, NM.

 

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