I was born in the Caribbean island-nation- The Commonwealth of Dominica (Dominica) I am a self-taught artist who has been painting for the past thirty-five(35) years. On emigrating to the USA in 1976, I became enamored of the museums in New York and was tremendously inspired to advance my painting. However, due to family issues, I chose not to study art (regrets that plague me constantly).

My frequent visits to museums in the USA and more recently London and Paris have served as my instructor. My predilection for visual puns was first stimulated when my mother, Mrs. Leoma A. Wilson...

I was born in the Caribbean island-nation- The Commonwealth of Dominica (Dominica) I am a self-taught artist who has been painting for the past thirty-five(35) years. On emigrating to the USA in 1976, I became enamored of the museums in New York and was tremendously inspired to advance my painting. However, due to family issues, I chose not to study art (regrets that plague me constantly).

My frequent visits to museums in the USA and more recently London and Paris have served as my instructor. My predilection for visual puns was first stimulated when my mother, Mrs. Leoma A. Wilson, was teaching my late brother, Eddie, and me to read. Having asked Eddie to identify the map of Italy, which he couldn't do, my mother then gave him an unforgetable hint. She said, 'Italy is kicking Sicily'. My interest in the double entendre lyrics of my life-long calypsonian hero, The Mighty Sparrow, further enflamed my passion for visual puns. But the final catalyst that cemented my obsession with visual puns was my discovery of the double image paintings of Salvador Dalí, and my reading of Leonardo da Vinci's suggestion to the artist about enhancing his creative faculties, that made me realize that I had found the style in which I wanted to continue painting. So, I sought to exploit this style to the fullest extent possible, hopefully beyond the accomplishment of even Dalí himself in that genre.

I call my style 'Anthropomorphic Perception: An exercise in Ultra-Perceptive Plausible Juxtaposition.' It entails a quest to depict the human form by plausibly and strategically juxtaposing commonplace objects to create an alternate reality. The use of inanimate objects to represent the human form is reminiscent of the cruel and reductive equation that slavery made with my African ancestors depreciating them, in the eyes of their slave-masters, to the status of merchandise. The influence of European artists, however, is not lost in my endeavor and as Leonardo said, ' the artist may enhance his creative faculties by staring at a stain on the wall', I have used this technique to discover what I call ' mnemonic images' (objects that my mind's eye perceives within an observed image and they are reminiscent of aspects of my personal life story) in the images that inspire me.

Mnemonic images are the component parts of my creations, which I discovered when I scrutinize the contours of a source image. They frequently have personal significance in my life. The ubiquitous 'hand of bananas' is a deferential reference to the 'hand that fed me' which is the hand of my late father, Mr. Henzie A. Wilson, who worked for seventeen of my formative years within the Banana Industry in my native Dominica. The boats in every painting were his working capital after he left the Banana Industry in 1969. The mountains which frequently double as eyebrows are located in my hometown of Portsmouth, where I first observed my parents' sweat from their brow trying to raise us in a decent home environment. That recurrent bay with boats moored therein is Portsmouth and it represents my mother's face, because it was in that town that my mother first stimulated my imagination towards the perception of visual puns. The inconspicuous 'Y' that simulates a woman's décoletage etched on vases and which represents a woman's accentuated breasts are a referencial tribute to those on which I have laid my head for the past twenty-eight years - Y for Yvonne's. Every nude, whether she be in the form of fruits and vegetables (nutricious and delectable) or a table or an apparition between trees is none other than my muse whose sinuous contours beguiled me one Sunday morning in February 1978. My eyes have not receded into their suckets since.

I presently live in the Jamaica area of Queens, New York, with my wife and muse of twenty-eight (28) years, Yvonne Chambers.