Landscapes

North Carolina landscape artist J. Chris Wilson has produced hundreds of paintings of the North Carolina landscape since settling in the state in 1974. Wilson's North Carolina landscape paintings are informed by his earliest abstract work. His previous NC landscape paintings reflect a broad range of interest in the scenic landscape, the built environment, and the historic landscapes and places of the region. The landscapes of North Carolina that predate the beginning of the highly focused "From Murphy to Manteo: An Artist's Scenic Journey" series laid the foundation for the large-scale series that followed. Cristina Virsida says in her 2012 essay "Moving Mountains" J. Chris Wilson's "From Murphy to Manteo" Series, that "Landscape artist and Southern Regionalist painter J. Chris Wilson is on a quest to create the largest and most ambitious series in the history of landscape art, a personal and comprehensive portrait of the entire state of North Carolina on canvas. Writing for Our State magazine, Michael Graff says in his SCENES OF 64 piece about "From Murphy to Manteo: An Artist's Scenic Journey,""The landscape of North Carolina, which has been photographed millions of times over, has never been painted like this." Some of the completed pieces already hang in the North Carolina Museum of History, which in a way makes Wilson's project a piece of our state's history already, and he's not even one-third done."