WILMA WORLD

This visual memoir captures pivotal performances as if one perfect polaroid of the event had survived.’Neo Naturists Beach Body Ready shows the artist B2 Gallery live-in in Wapping in tribal face paint (1982), My Covent Garden Début her appearance at the Royal Opera House with Michael Clark and Leigh Bowery.

After a gap of 30 years Wilma started performing again during the Neo Naturist Retrospective at Studio Voltiare - The Best of All Possible Worlds shows her body printing the chapel. Other recent events celebrated in the show include Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World at the Globe Theatre and a winter solstice pagan ritual on the banks of the River Thames.

I started these paintings on a trip to Greece in 2021 ….. unfortunately while we were on the plane Greece unexpectedly went into lockdown. We had a surreal week trying to break into archeological sites, reading Stephen Fry’s Mythos on empty beaches and marvelling at the beauty and power of legend and history on every street corner. I did think that when we meet a guy and sigh “He was like a Greek God” we should remember the hazards of catching the eye of a horny Olympian!

I’m going back in May 2020 to participate in the postponed exhibition at the Project Gallery in Athens, hoping to actually eat some Greek food, drink in some Greek vars and finally consult the Oracle in Delphi !

In November 2019, the Neo Naturists were invited to decorate the Cork Street Christmas Tree at House of Voltaire. The commission included over 100 hand painted baubles, over 50 pairs of bespoke rubber gloves by Wilma Johnson and a performance with The Raincoats and Louisa Buck.

To read Louisa Buck’s story click here

To buy gloves click here

To buy baubles click here

Autobiographical images in ink and gouache for one woman show at Gallery 286 in London in 2017.

In 2016, Wilma had 2 exhibitions of ink drawing in the Basque village of Guéthary, at Providence Gallery and Maison Marienia Arts Association.

A series of portraits of women with dogs painted by the artist Wilma Johnson in 2015.

The Dogs and Goddesses project was made for the Art Car Boot Fair events at Truman Brewery in Brick Lane and the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate.

This was followed by an exhibition at The Stash Gallery in Vout-O-Reenees in November 2015 ‘ A Cat Among the Dogs’

Wilma Johnson's travel memoir Surf Mama published by Summersdale in June 2011

'After a life of traveling, painting and performing with the infamous Neo Naturists, Wilma Johnson ended up in an isolated Irish fishing village playing earth mother to her three children. Then she had a revelation on the Westernmost beach in Europe…… she wanted to become a surfer.

She was 42 and had never done any sport in her life, but she didn’t let this put her off. She moved to Biarritz, where she found herself plunged into the world of the beautiful people. She left her husband and swapped a board for a painting, but her first outings into the Bay of Biscay ended in tears, broken bones and a fractured ego.'

Wilma's travel memoir Surf Mama was originally published by Beautiful Books as an illustrated hardback version containing 50 colour illustrations, some from painting archives, others made for the book.

The paperback version with updated and edited text was published by Summersdale in June 2014 and is currently being developed as a film by Powderkeg Productions Uk and The Amazing Film Company, Germany.

The paperback is available from Waterstones, Amazon, Stanfords and WH Smith. Hardback stock was destroyed by fire and is currently unavailable.

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Series of oil paintings shown at Salle d’Attente Gallery in Biarritz.

I move to a dilapidated pink villa with my children and menagerie. The garden is wild and overgrown, the orange tree bears fruit too bitter to eat, owls and bats and churchbells keep us awake at night, I work in the basement among cobwebs, I have a hige party once a year at Halloween. Painting of fairy tales and ghosts of the belle epoque, a surreal Mexican love affair, goddesses and absinthe drinkers.....

Paintings and collages made in and inspired by Biarritz exhibited at Highgate Fine Arts in London January 2005.

My Fantasy Kimono 2004.

Paintings inspired by my kitchen sink in the westernmost fishing village in Europe, exhibited at Highgate Fine Art injanuary 2004.

My house on the edge of the earth, the Dingle peninsula is wild and isolated, the National Geographic called it 'one of the most beautiful places on earth. You fall under its spell, and like the old fashioned faery land, you can easily stay too long, without noticing time pass. After ten years I know I have to leave and as I do I make a series of paintings, Tir na nOg, the enchanted land of the west,

Paintings by the artist Wilma Johnson 1999

Sliced Iguana was a series of paintings inspired by memories of Mexico, by the crazy idea of writing a Mexican cookbook memoir while living on the west coast of Ireland, In the end there were few words, and even fewer recipes, but my studio was full of tropical colours, in defiance of the stormy Irish winter /

Bavarian Jigsaws is a series of large scale oil paintings inspired by several months spent in Bavaria, exhibited at the Chateau de Sacy art centre in Picardy. wilma was also involved in the fisrt exhibition at the chateau London Exotiques in 1996.

Paintings by the artist Wilma Johnson 1994, made in Ballydavid in West Kerry, Ireland

Paintings by the artist Wilma Johnson 1988-1991

Ghana, Nigeria, Costa Rica, Okracoke. Carnets de Voyages.

Paintings by the artist Wilma Johnson 1987-1988

Then I went to Mexico on holiday and I didn't come back for a year. Following the fiesta, on the trail of Frida Kahlo, drinking pulque with her friends, painting as I travelled between Mexico City, Oaxaca, Guatemala, San Miguel Allende, Veracruz.....

Paintings by Wilma Johnson 1980-1987

London, the Neo Naturists, performances and paintings fuse together. I leave college and go straight to the Faaery Fair , then to Wapping where we do a week long live-in performance at the B2 Gallery in Wapping. We perform at the Royal Opera House with Michael Clark and Leigh Bowery.

I hitch to Lappland and Iceland and back to Rome, I paint voyages performances, pagan rituals, Stonehenge, Goddesses and Madonnas,

Most of the paintings from this period were destroyed by fire in 2015, 

Paintings by Wilma Johnson 1978-1982

The art college was on Charing Cross road, it was the beginning of the New Romantic movement. Charles Fox theatrical costumiers in Covent Garden were selling off their stock for peanuts, so if you were bored of your outfit by lunchtime you could go and buy another

By day we wandered round Soho drinking coffee dressed as Marie Antoinette, Boudicea or pirate queens, at night we danced to Bowie in Clubs like the Blitz, Heaven and Hell, or went to Fellini all-nighters at the Scala.

Then I retreated to my studio on the roof of the building and put it on canvas, or took over the fire escape and adjoining rooftops to photograph Christine Binnie as beauty queen, mermaid, pagan priestess.

In holidays I hitched to Rome, Florence and Venice with Mo Tomaney, backpacks filled with party dresses and watercolours. We took our sketchbooks everywhere - to museums and bars, churches and beaches. We painted in the ruins of Pompeii and on Venetian canals, if we waited too long for a lift we painted each other in Oxfam shop cocktail dresses trying to cross the Alps. On one page there might be painting of Mo as Wallis Simpson on the Great St. Bernard pass, on the nest a sign reading ‘Venezia per Favore !’

All paintings in this gallery were destroyed by fire in 2015.