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Jurgen Wilms grew up in Germany and attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, but he found himself at odds with the prevailing trends of the time. Abstraction was all the rage, whereas he was interested in realist painters whose outlook was modern.
Wilms left the Academy in 1974 and went to live in India, Thailand, and other countries. He studied Eastern philosophies and painted whenever a subject attracted him. In 1982, he took his mobile lifestyle to America. His formal career began in 1993 when he visited an art supply store in Hawaii to buy some brushes. He was carrying a painting he had just completed, and another customer walked up and asked where he had gotten it. Upon learning that he was the artist, she told him she was a gallery owner and asked to see more work. “This is the only one,” he said. “Well, paint more,” she replied.
Every work of art serves as an object of contemplation, but a truly electric landscape painting can take the viewer into another realm entirely. Jurgen Wilms paintings hum silently, invoking a deeply peaceful energy. His dynamic skies draw the spirit upward.
Wilms now lives in the northern New Mexico wilderness, in a mountainous area with tall pines and a river at his front door, which faces east toward a huge mesa populated by wild horses. “Living in the mountains and breathing the air reminds me of old concepts in the Yogic texts,” he says. “Out here, my whole life can be a meditation. I respond to the beauty I see, and paint it as a recognition of its beauty.”
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