Howling man in landscape

David Brian Wilson was one of the most accomplished mature-age graduates of the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney in the early to mid 1970s, when Richard (Dick) Ashton, grandson of Julian, was its Director. A distinguished draughtsman of the human figure, he is admired for his portraits, still life, figure compositions and landscapes and was a respected teacher of life drawing and painting in Sydney and Bathurst.

This is one of Wilson’s most emotionally searing images, something of a premonition perhaps of the anguish he suffered over the disease (stomach cancer) which killed him at 51. It also brings Edvard Munch's best known painting 'The scream' to mind. The landscape in the drawing is that which Wilson saw daily from his studio window in the tiny country town of Rockley (half an hour’s drive from Bathurst in the mid-west of New South Wales) where he lived and worked. The copse of trees is the subject of one of his last paintings 'Yellow tree' 1998 and various smaller studies for it, including small-scale paintings. The figure is also related to a sculpture he was working on before he died.