Jean Wilkey

Jean Wilkey’s realist oil paintings combine both real and fake versions of nature to see how they “play” together in her constructed worlds. She’s fascinated with the play of light, shadow and color, which runs the gamut from bright and tropical to dark and moody. She imbues her compositions with personal symbolism but hopes the viewer will make his or her own metaphorical associations from the work.

Wilkey was fascinated with her grandmother’s paintings and always knew she would be an artist, having done her first oil painting at age 3 (much to her mother’s dismay). But she also dreamed of traveling the world so after graduating with degrees in art and education, she traveled to more than a dozen countries and lived for extended periods in Honduras, Costa Rica and Israel. Returning to the United States after more than two decades away, painting and showing her work all the while, she got her Master of Fine Arts degree in painting. She lives in New Mexico with her husband and two dogs, Simon and Schuster, and teaches at New Mexico State University.

Her work has been shown widely and is found in private collections in ten countries.