Scottie Wilson

Art Brokerage: Scottie Wilson Scottish Folk Artist: b. 1891-1972. Scottie Wilson also known as Louis Freeman (who later changed his name to Robert “Scottie” Wilson) grew up in a tenement room-and-kitchen in Glasgow and left home at the age of nine to be a drummer boy in the army, where he acquired the nickname “Scottie,” commonly applied to Scottish soldiers. Scottie Wilson’s early drawings were populated by malevolent figures that he described as “evils and greedies.” He started creating his totem-like figures and patterns, often built up of parallel lines, in his secondhand shop in Toronto. Years later, Wilson described how he was listening to Mendelssohn when “all of a sudden I dipped the bulldog pen into a bottle of ink and started drawing—doodling I suppose you’d call it—on the cardboard tabletop.” His later works are benevolent, decorative depictions of nature, especially birds, fish, flowers, and fauna, which (perhaps coincidentally) happen also to be the three major components of the crest of Glasgow, where he spent much of his childhood. He also designed and hand painted earthenware with the same iconography for England’s Royal Worcester Porcelain Company. Artists André Breton and Pablo Picasso were early collectors of his now widely sought-after work.