Artist Information
Artist
John (Jack) Craig Seaton Wilkinson, RCA (1927-2007)Role
PainterDate made
1990Time Period
20th CenturyNotes
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Born in Windsor, Ontario, John Craig Seaton “Jack” Wilkinson was an influential Canadian artist and arts administrator. Raised in England, he studied architecture, painting and sculpture at Westham Municipal College, Newport College of Art and Medway College, where he received a diploma in painting. During World War II he served in the Royal Air Force coming to Canada in 1955.
Wilkinson twice ran his own art school in Victoria, but perhaps his greatest mark on the local and provincial art scene came while working in the 1960s as staff artist and senior architectural draughtsman in the Provincial Department of Public Works. As chairman of the Provincial Committee on Art for two years, Wilkinson launched a period of intense activity with art policy for the provincial government and oversaw the purchase of 600 works for the provincial collection, and also arranged major art commissions for new provincial buildings. He was involved in Victoria’s Centennial Square revitalization and development project, designing the huge focal point fountain with mosaic monolith totems in 1965. It was commissioned and gifted by the municipalities of Saanich, Oak Bay and Esquimalt in commemoration of the Centennial of the founding of the City of Victoria in 1862. He was also known for other major commissions, including a large bronze sculpture for the B.C. Provincial School for the Deaf in Burnaby, murals at the B.C. Institute of Technology, sculptures for the Quesnel courthouse and Bull River Fish Hatchery, and the Royal B.C. Museum’s Carillon tower.
As of 1975 he devoted himself to painting full-time and exhibited during the following years at the B.C. legislature, the University of British Columbia, the Vancouver and Victoria city art galleries, and other galleries in Alberta and Ontario. He exhibited with Victoria-based Modernist art group The Limners, and in the exhibition "Art in Victoria” 1960/1986 at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.
