Beau Wild
A native Floridian, Beau Wild was educated in occupational therapy at Tufts University and in painting at the Museum School / Museum of Fine Arts, both in Boston. Dual roles as therapist and painter spanned decades and each enhanced the success of the other. Beau returned to her childhood hometown of Daytona Beach, Florida in 1983 after 22 years in New England. Since then, Beau has shown work in nationwide art festivals, competitions and museums including the Museum of Florida art, Florida Museum for Women Artists, Melbourne’s Foosaner Art Museum, Ormond Memorial Art Museum, Tampa’s Museum of Science and industry and the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art at St. Petersburg College. Her work was included in an international exhibition in Barry, Vale of Glamorgan, Wales UK. (2014)
Beau Wild has won a variety of awards, including "Best in Show" in competitive exhibits and has participated in both solo and group exhibitions regionally and nationally. Twice accepted into the Witness to Creativity installation exhibits sponsored by the Florida Museum for Women Artists, Wild's 2010 piece titled "Friends" dealt with the changing nature of friendships over time and the 2012 piece titled Temporal Passages revealed her painting process through time lapse photography. Beau Wild was awarded the lifetime achievement award in 2015 during a national competition in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Today, she paints daily in her studio on Rose Bay in Port Orange, Florida. A painter of great curiosity and tenacity, Beau Wild has for 30 years, explored figurative painting — the bond between the painter and the subject, the subject alone or in groups, even the artist's own relationship with herself. The studio on Rose Bay with its breathtaking waterscape views would tempt any painter of nature, yet this artist's attention throughout decades of exploration, remains on what is simply called "the figure." Acutely aware that this artist is, in fact, presenting more than this implies, it is the painter of the interior, the personal, the intimate, (paraphrased from the essay by Fran Gardner, University of South Carolina Lancaster in Beau Wild: Between the Seen and the Unseen, 2014).
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Artist Statement
As early as I can remember I was an observer. Several questions intrigued me then and continue to intrigue me now -- why people do what they do? What motivates their actions and reactions? What makes us all "tick"? Whether it is an elderly woman's feeling of isolation, the outsider's anxiety when courting a new friend, the conflicting joy and sadness of the surrogate mother, the unforgotten lives of those who have passed, and these deeply empathic connections are sensitive glimpses. While I assume the objective position of the observer, these glimpses open a small window through which I also look inside my own emotional life. - Beau Wild