William Wilson was a special artist within the group who became known as the Edinburgh School. Beginning his career in printmaking, he created some of the twentieth century’s most atmospheric prints of Scottish town and landscape, before turning his hand to watercolour painting in the 1940s. In 1937 he opened a stained glass business that became renowned in Britain, creating over 400 windows worldwide in its thirty-plus years of practice. Wilson made a unique contribution to Scottish art in the twentieth century and this talk will explore his work across the three disciplines in which he made his mark.
Sandy Wood is Head of Collections at the Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture. He is responsible for the management, care of, and access to the RSA’s uniquely formed collection, Recognised as a collection of National Significance to Scotland.
Sandy joined the RSA in 2003 after graduating in Fine Art from Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, later completing a Masters in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. Starting work at the RSA as a technician, he was appointed Assistant Curator in 2010 and Collections Curator in 2013. His areas of interest include the stories woven between historic and contemporary practice and practitioners, artistic lineage and legacy and the revealing of art through process and artistic voice.
Recent exhibitions and publications have included James Cumming RSA (1922-1991): Symbols of the Mind, 2015; UnRealised: Architectural Imagination from the RSA Collections, 2016; Ages of Wonder: Scotland’s Art 1540 to Now, RSA and Touring Scotland, 2017-21, Andiamo! Forty Years of the John Kinross Scholarships to Florence, 2021, and William Gillies: Modernism and Nation, 2023
I’ve an Angel in the Oven: The sublime art of William Wilson