PORT TOWNSEND — The work of a prominent artist who began his career in Port Townsend will be a featured attraction of this month’s gallery walk.
The exhibit, titled “Thomas T. Wilson: The Best Known Unknown Artist in the Northwest,” opened at the Jefferson Museum of Art & History, 540 Water St., on March 20 with no scheduled end date.
“Tom was one of the first artists to arrive here in the 1960s and was one who drove the renaissance of art and culture in Port Townsend,” said Bill Tennent, the museum’s executive director.
“He went on to become a much-beloved artist. We are displaying his early work when he lived in Port Townsend,” Tennent added.
Wilson, 83, who lives in Seattle, attended the exhibit opening but will not be present for the Saturday event, scheduled from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m.
The exhibit features 29 paintings portraying Wilson’s work and concentrates on the three subjects for which he is best known: portraits, landscapes and trees.
Regular exhibit hours are from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily.
Most of Wilson’s early paintings hang in the homes of the original purchasers and are rarely seen in public, Tennent said.
Those in this exhibit are on loan from those people or part of the museum’s regular collection.
The show is curated by Ann Welch of Port Townsend, herself an artist and the subject of one of the paintings in the exhibit.
That portrait was painted when Welch was 11 years old. She is now 63.
The portrait usually hangs in Welch’s home office, but she has loaned it to the museum for the duration of the show.
The sitting took place in Wilson’s studio, which now houses Uptown Nutrition.
The studio was spacious, which allowed Wilson to paint large canvases, some of them 8 feet across, Welch said.
“I knew Tom when I sat for the portrait. He was a lot of fun,” Welch said.
“People liked him, and he was different from everybody else,” she added.
“He was engaged in what I had to say and always talked to me as if I were a contemporary.”
Welch, who went on to work with pottery and glass, said Wilson inspired her to seek a career in art.
“It opened up the possibilities for me,” she said.
“He was the first person who showed me that being an artist was something you could actually do for a living, and from that point on, I was never gainfully employed.”
According to an essay — which is part of the exhibit — written by Wilson’s friend, Mary Coney, Wilson arrived in Port Townsend by bus July 3, 1960, for a weekend visit and stayed 14 years.
“And so, almost by chance, he found the place that was to become his home and to which he brought his many talents as a painter, a teacher, an art organizer, and perhaps most importantly his Irish gift for friendship,” Coney wrote.
Coney quoted Peter Simpson, a longtime Port Townsend resident and friend of Wilson’s whose portrait is also part of the exhibit.
“Wilson took to Port Townsend as if it were extended family. It was as if the town was ready for a new period of artistic burgeoning and its artist arrived just in time,” Simpson said.
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Jefferson County Editor Charlie Bermant can be reached at 360-385-2335 or cbermant@peninsuladailynews.com.