Ron Wigginton (born October 1, 1944, in Oakland, California) is an American artist and landscape architect. His paintings and sculptures are found in West Coast museums and many private collections. His landscapes are known for their narrative and aesthetic qualities, and his artwork typically involves and explores human perceptions of natural and built landscapes. Wigginton is considered to be one of the first Landscape Architects to approach the design of a landscape as a conceptual work of art, for which he has received international recognition through publication and awards.
Education and influences
Wigginton graduated from El Cerrito (California) High School. He received a B.F.A. from the University of Montana and an M.F.A from the University of Oregon. As a young man he studied briefly with painter David Simpson, and in Montana he worked with ceramicist and sculptor Rudy Autio and poet Richard Hugo. In Oregon he met and befriended painter Charles Stokes, later sharing studios and exhibiting with him in Portland and Seattle. In 1973 he met sculptor J.B. Blunk, with whom he maintained a friendship and working relationship until Blunk's death in 2002. In the book San Diego Artists (1988), Wigginton tells of an early and ongoing affinity for Japanese culture which led to a hitchhiking trip through Japan in 1970. There he met Japanese potters and Living National Treasures, including Shoji Hamada, Fujiwara Kei, and others: “I was able to travel through the central spine of the country tracking down the ancient dragon kilns and meeting masters, very unusual people, very inspiring."
He returned to Japan in 1977 for an extended stay, establishing a painting studio close to the Mizumi Gallery in Tokyo and meeting international artists including Agnes Martin. On his return to the U.S., he settled in San Diego, where he studied with Niwa landscape master Takendo Arii.
Painting and sculpture
During the 1970s, Wigginton taught painting and sculpture at Cornish School of the Arts in Seattle. Paintings and sculptures from this period and afterward are held in numerous private and public collections, including the Oakland Museum of California, the Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon, the Seattle Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, Portland, Oregon, the Center for Folk Art and Contemporary Crafts, San Francisco, the Rainer Bank Collection, Seattle, and the Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner, Washington.
Reviewing Source of Power, a 1981 exhibit at the Quint Gallery in La Jolla, California, Robert McDonald wrote in Artweek that the series consisted of “twelve works combining painting and sculpture," all “visual metaphors for physical and spiritual power, for nature and man. . . . The paintings are abstract landscapes, skyscapes, or simply atmospheres. The sculptural forms . . . represent both man-made, architectural forms . . . and natural, topographic features, such as mountains and oceans. Installed at eye level, the pieces are small worlds for exploration.” Elise Miller, reviewing Source of Power in the Los Angeles Times, noted that “the multifaceted process and sheer beauty of Wigginton’s art work are immediately intriguing” and that the “pieces reward on many levels. The more time taken, the more they are understood.” Thematically, Miller observed the focus on “power over death, power to create, spiritual power, and power as energy, from land, sun, water, wind, the atom.” But “rather than define sources” of this power, Miller wrote, “Wigginton seeks to expose human concepts about sources, as if he were a compassionate observer of all time and space, sitting on the edge of the universe.”
In 2002, Wigginton began working at his mountain studio in Cascadel Woods, North Fork, California. There, he began a new series of ethereal paintings on canvas and aluminum panels. In 2018, he completed "Experimental Heavens" the fifth monograph of paintings designed by graphic artist Lynn Robb of Santa Monica. The five books consist of seventy-five works shown consecutively in unbroken sequence created over four years.