Born in suburban Detroit in 1969, Hugh grew up in Washington DC and attended St. Albans prep school. After graduating from Duke University in 1991, he went to work in corporate finance for a top tier investment bank. He became interested in art after attending an open life drawing class in New York in 1998, and began his formal art education at Otis College of Art and Design in 2001. Hugh has been painting in Algeria and Niger since early 2006. In 2008, he began painting the faces of America's working people. You can see all of his work here .

Hugh Wilson is a kindred spirit to me. As an artist, he examines the problem of existential meaning in relation to the fleeting beauty that transmits meaning in daily experience. He is focused, often, on what might erroneously be considered the manly ethic of the spiritual traveler. Always in his work you can see the struggle of the artist birthing himself into a new world.

Hugh used to draw when we were young. Bruce Lee. Tom Cruise. Cars. In his early adulthood, he moved from world to world looking for work to satisfy his thirst for knowledge. He was an 80s prep-school jock, a banker, a filmmaker, a wanderer, and now a painter. Painting is his calling, and his decision to pursue it formally, to learn how to paint classically, has given him a medium to communicate his ideas.

His latest series of portraits, created from life over three months in Northfork, West Virginia, is his finest work to date.

Hugh is also a very good writer and we hope to coax him into publishing his notes here soon.