John Lytle Wilson: Bringing robots to the Magic City

When people ask painter John Lytle Wilson what he is known for, he smiles. “Monkeys and robots,” he says.

Wilson is a Magic City painter of brightly-colored, energetic pieces that depict narrative scenes of his signature mischievous monkeys or laser-pointing robots. If locals haven’t seen his popular work on canvases, they might know him for his Morris Avenue mural, where a robot with a cape towers 50 feet in the air.

Wilson, now a Highland Park resident, grew up and began creating art in South Carolina. But he spent one year of his childhood in Shanghai, China. During his time there, he was exposed to children’s books he wouldn’t have seen in America. One series that stuck with him was an adaptation of a Chinese epic novel that was called “Journey of the West,” which was about a magic monkey king.

“I was fascinated with those stories and collected all of the books I could, and that was probably the genesis of me doodling monkeys. I’ve never had my monkeys want to be that story or anything, but that is sort of where it lodged in my imagination,” Wilson said.

For his undergraduate degree, he went to Birmingham-Southern College, where he majored in art before going to Florida State University for his master’s in painting. Wilson said that, as an undergraduate, he thought that painting and art had to be “dark and moody.”

“I was making these ponderous oil paintings of people who were shadowy, and frankly, what I was doing wasn’t very true to my personality,” he said.

Between his time at BSC and his second year of graduate school, which was about 15 years ago, Wilson realized he wanted his style to change. He also started painting mainly in acrylics.

That was the year his style started to jell into more of what it is today, he said, and he started really focusing on what animals, monkeys and his other signature imagery meant in his art.

A few years after he graduated, he moved back to Birmingham, where he worked for a while as an art teacher. Wilson said he loves that kids and adults in the Birmingham community are able to interact with his art and interpret it in so many different ways.

“I do like for things to be open-ended, and I do love the possibilities that sort of serve as a way to launch someone else’s imagination. … I’m just as happy if someone has a completely different meaning than I do,” he said.

Monkeys are always being a little bit mischievous, he said, and if they’re not, the viewer can take away the potential of that in a painting. He first started painting robots largely because he always loved “old, goofy sci-fi,” he said, and he started getting in touch with the symbolism that robots have and how they play as an opposition to animals.

“Compared with the monkeys, it’s a sort of id and super-ego sort of thing, sort of a protohuman or post-form kind of life form, and those kinds of interplays are fun to mess with,” Wilson said.

Wilson said he has always been fascinated in religious iconography from different traditions, and he likes to mix and incorporate them with other pop culture elements, specifically from his ’80s childhood. The bright and colorful ’80s vibe has always found its way into his art, he added, where things such as Transformers, Star Wars, Care Bears, My Little Pony and Saturday morning cartoons have influenced his style.

“I was really interested in kind of this idea of this ‘kitschy’ lowbrow entertainment mixed with this kind of sacred art,” he said.

At first, the robots and monkeys were put into more formal compositions and posed positions, but little by little, he said, he was able to loosen up and have them become much more action-oriented, even if it’s in an unrealistic situation.

“It’s a little more now a world-building exercise where I’ve got these back stories of who the robots are and who the monkeys are and all this kind of stuff, but that sort of built slowly over time,” he said.

The other type of work he is known for is his “corrected paintings,” where he takes primarily old landscape paintings and adds in scenes of robots or monkeys. Wilson said when he moved to his first studio in Tallahassee, Florida, the person before him left some paintings they didn’t want. He started working on top of them for fun, and when he opened his studio for a First Friday event, he got a really good response from the community about them, so he’s been continuing them since.

“My little schtick about it is that some people forget to put monkeys and robots into paintings, and when I can fix that, I do,” he said.

Wilson goes around to antique malls, estate sales and thrift stores and buys up old paintings or sometimes portraits to paint over. He said the corrected paintings, which he usually does with acrylics, tend to be more light-hearted and not have extensive deeper meaning.

“I think people like art that takes itself a little less seriously sometimes and those paintings certainly work on that level,” he said.

Wilson was named the 2019 Featured Artist for the Magic City Art Connection and has partnered with the Birmingham Museum of Art on a collaborative paint-by-number experience piece. He is currently featured in several Birmingham art galleries and sells his work at the Grand Bohemian Hotel Gallery. Each year, he also sells work at various outdoor art festivals and events around Birmingham, including the downtown Artwalk held in September.

As of last year, Wilson has decided to be a full-time, professional artist. In the near future, he has plans for more murals. Commission requests and other paintings are available for purchase on his website at johnlytlewilson.com.