Richard Wilson

Richard Wilson is a muralist and portrait painter from London, now based in Detroit, known for large spray-painted wall portraits of musicians and public figures, including murals of Cristiano Ronaldo in Madeira, Will Smith in West Philadelphia and Stevie Wonder in downtown Detroit. He is not the Scottish actor Richard Wilson.

Work

According to his website, his interest in art began with graffiti in the 1980s, and from 2010 he developed as a portrait painter on walls using spray paint; he has since added studio work in oils, mostly portraits, figurative pieces and still life.

In 2018 he painted a portrait of Will Smith on a building at 4545 Girard Avenue in West Philadelphia. He funded the project himself and chose the wall on Google Maps, with organisational help from Mural Arts Philadelphia. He came to Detroit later that year for the Murals in the Market festival, and in 2019 completed a self-funded mural of Stevie Wonder, about 8,000 square feet, on the south wall of the Music Hall Center for the Performing Arts, based on a 1976 photograph by Douglas Kirkland. He then began a second mural at the Music Hall, commissioned by the London charity Education Is Not A Crime.

His website also lists a wall portrait of Roy Ayers in Brockley, south-east London, and says his oil painting Songbook was shown at the National Portrait Gallery in 2020.