Ms. Brooke Davis Anderson, Director and Curator, The Contemporary Center, American Folk Art Museum
An engaging monograph on the self-taught artist Scottie Wilson, which is thoughtfully organized and thoroughly researched.

Professor Roger Cardinal, University of Kent Canterbury in the United Kingdom
The authors delve into the obscure areas of Scottie Wilson’s life and come up with some interesting fresh material.

Colin Rhodes, Professor of Art History & Theory, Loughborough University in the United Kingdom
[This book] does an excellent job of bringing together published and archival sources to provide the fullest account to date...

Book Description
Scottie Wilson (1891–1972) was a self-taught artist who achieved recognition from both the art world and the popular media. Nevertheless, he remained an outsider who lived modestly and would sell his pictures to people he met on the street for a fraction of what they sold for in galleries. Scottie Wilson: Peddler Turned Painter tells the fascinating story of this complex and enigmatic figure, presenting many new biographical details, based on extensive research, and tracing the evolution of his art. The color plates illustrate works in various media spanning the length of Scottie’s career, and this volume also includes a selection of remarkable black-and-white portraits of the artist.

About the Author
Anthony J. Petullo is an art collector and the president of a charitable foundation. He is the author of Self-Taught and Outsider Art: The Anthony Petullo Collection (University of Illinois Press, 2001). He lives in Milwaukee and Scottsdale, Arizona.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Scottie Wilson (1891-1972) was a self-taught artist who achieved recognition from both the art world and the popular media.  Nevertheless, he remained an outsider who lived modestly and would sell his pictures to people he met on the street for a fraction of what they sold for in galleries.  The child of Eastern European ￯﾿ﾽmigr￯﾿ﾽs, Scottie (born Lewis Freeman) grew up in the poor, predominantly Jewish Gorbals section of Glasgow.  He left school at the age of nine, worked at a number of odd jobs, and after a period in the military (which included serving on the Western Front during World War I), established himself in London as a dealer in secondhand goods. 

In the 1930s Scottie moved to Canada, and it was there, in the back room of his shop, that he discovered his vocation as an artist.  Once he began drawing, he never stopped, and he eventually began to show his work throughout Canada.  Given the difficulties of his early life, Scottie's drawings and paintings are surprisingly idyllic, dominated by vividly colored flora and fauna, rendered in a distinctive hatching technique.  In 1945 he returned to London, where he initially exhibited with the Surrealists, who saw affinities between Scottie's inventive imagery and their own art.  He later traveled to France to meet artists Jean Dubuffet and Pablo Picasso, who both acquired examples of his work, and in the 1960s he received commissions to design patterns for ceramics and textiles.  Despite his successes, Scottie remained aloof from the cultural establishment, viewing his utopian images as providing an alternative to "this wicked world."