Gladys Nilsson on Keeping Things Askew
September 8, 2026
Ahead of Gleefully Askew: A Gladys Nilsson Retrospective, Curator Francesca Wilmott sat down with the artist to discuss her offbeat approach to art and life, her love for art history, the importance of surprise, and what she discovered through re-encountering sixty years of artmaking in preparation for the exhibition. Conducted in May 2025 and published in Nilsson’s 2026 exhibition catalogue, this interview explores connections between three artworks completed at different moments in her career: Dipped Dick: Adam and Eve After Cranach (1971), Gleefully Askew (2019), and Loded (2025), a collage she was then in the process of making. Nilsson’s commentary on Loded—now complete and on view—provides a glimpse into how she develops ideas from close observation into a finished artwork. Visit the Crocker through November 29, 2026, to see Loded, and Nilsson’s six decades of incisive, witty, and joyous artwork in person.
Francesca Wilmott (FW): Gleefully Askew is a title that you first used for a 2019 painting (Fig. 2), but of course a certain gleefulness is present in your work throughout your career. When did ideas of glee and humor first enter the picture?
Gladys Nilsson (GN): Laughing and the ability to laugh is one of the great gifts that we’re given. If you choose to use it, then it makes a better world for you rather than to always be negative or seriously inclined. I mean, it’s very important to be very serious about things, and I am serious about [my work], but I think being able to have a relaxed viewpoint lets more in. And I love to laugh. I mean, we’ve talked before about how a good laugh and a good cry are very cathartic, and it makes you feel when you laugh so hard you cry, which is very common in my family. The three of us—Claude, Jim, and I—can watch a movie that is funny and start laughing. And that sort of triggers more laughter from one to another that we’re all just wiping our eyes, and it’s wonderful. It feels really good to have that experience.
FW: Humor and allowing yourself to feel deeply can also be a form of resistance. It feels necessary, like a tool for survival.
GN: Exactly. Survival in the olden days—and I mean the really olden days—was survival of the fittest. You had to know how to defend yourself. You had to know how to walk from point A to point B, whether it was from the cave to the outside of the cave without having some huge predator jump you. And I think the feeling of survival and being able to keep your wits about you, and having that good laugh, is necessary. So much negativity [builds up] that you need it in order to keep your sanity and your health.
FW: Yes, laughter is vital in order to feel human and recognize the humanity of others.
GN: I like to laugh.
FW: I’ve noticed!
GN: And I have a very loud laugh [laughter]. Claude went through a period of time when he would refuse to sit with us at the movie theater because we’d laugh. As Suzanne [Adan] pointed out in one conversation, Jim and I would start laughing before the punch line because we had already worked it forward in our minds from watching enough early classics.
FW: You knew the formula.
GN: We knew what was happening and we could see it being set up. So, we’d start laughing because it was so damn funny. Everybody would turn around in the movies and might look at us. We weren’t people who talked in the movies, but we would laugh, and we would freely laugh. One of the most important things for a couple is to be able to laugh together. Jim and I have that ability to just burst out laughing and enjoy that aspect of each other’s personality a great deal. And that was so in the very beginning and has continued through. We can be in the middle of a quiet tiff of no great importance and sit down and watch a film together, and before you know it, we’re laughing like hell at the same things. We’ll laugh on our deathbeds.
FW: That would be a good way to go, laughing all the way.
GN: Better than the alternative. Of course, you have no choice as to what you’re going to say or do on your deathbed.
FW: This is true.
GN: Exit laughing. Isn’t that a play title?
FW: Yes! People talk about last words, but no words are necessary, just laughter.
We’ve talked about “Gleeful.” How about “Askew”? There has always been something off-beat in your approach.
GN: Well, I like to play with sensibilities, with how other people might view sensibility. Playing with having my lines in a drawing not meet started back in school, actually. I often visit a [Paul] Cézanne in the collection of the Art Institute [of Chicago] that really points that out. It may have been Whitney [Halstead] or Kathleen Blackshear who first introduced the work to me, but that’s immaterial. Cézanne would put the line where it was needed, and there is one horizontal still life where the line of the table changes in three parts very radically. And I’ve always liked that. That an artist could choose. He didn’t have to go straight across like it was in real life but could choose to put in what was needed at that particular moment, in that particular part of the canvas. I have used things like that. So things purposefully don’t meet, and that’s why she [the subject] is looking at that askew-ness in my painting (Gleefully Askew, 2019).
FW: There’s a rupture in the red paintbrush and in the canvas that she is painting.
GN: And that goes all along, all the areas are like that. In some of the diptychs I did, I had purposely lined up things to meet, and in other places not to meet.
FW: We see that in your 1971 diptych Dipped Dick…Adam and Eve After Cranach (Fig. 3) too.
GN: That was purposeful. In other pieces there are areas that are purposeful and other areas that are not.
FW: You’re making a new work (Loded, Fig. 4) in response to Charles Christian Nahl’s Sunday Morning in the Mines (1872, Fig. 5) in the Crocker’s collection. We spent some time together in Sacramento looking at the painting and there’s something askew in Nahl’s division of the rowdy group on horseback on the left from the virtuous miners on the right.
GN: The horses are visually below in the Nahl. I didn’t notice it at first because I was more involved with that group of horses as being thunderous, and there’s lots of dust being stirred about. So I didn’t quite catch the fact that it was a dropped area. That was interesting to me that I didn’t catch it at first. It is just like some of the things that I play with in my work. And I like that.
FW: The horses are not receding into the distance.
GN: They’re not receding or lower. The scale is very similar, which is why I took it to be all immediately all on the same plane before I really was examining the painting. And I laughed at myself, “Oh my God, you’re such a viewer, and you didn’t really catch that,” you know? That was fun!
FW: You have an appreciation for other artists’ thought processes.
GN: I do have an idea as to how I want it to play out [in my response to Nahl]. I haven’t quite decided how I’m going to handle that aspect of my drawing in response.
FW: That rupture?
GN: I haven’t decided if that’s important with what I’m going to do with the painting or not, since it’s not going to be a literal redoing of the Nahl. It’s going to be whatever I feel like. The still life in the foreground is also a beautiful part of it, not immediately noticed, but it’s a very important part of the Nahl. How am I going to handle that aspect of it?
Now I have a flash of looking at some of these large Dutch still lifes that are all encompassing, with a huge groaning table filled with game. There’s every conceivable creature that the purveyors have shot. But then, below the table is interesting because there’s always some cat or dog that’s peering out, and that’s lovely. That may or may not be an aspect of my still life.
FW: In Nahl’s painting, the viewers must look beyond the still life to see the figures in action. The still life fades away. It’s also interesting how Nahl placed a tree right down the center, dividing the moral miners on the right from the sinners on the left.
GN: It divides it up as a diptych.
FW: We also see a central tree in your Dipped Dick…Adam and Eve After Cranach (1971, Fig. 3)—separating the sinful Eve on the right panel. The tree again appears in your 2018 painting A Red Tree (Fig. 6).
GN: The tree is very important in the Cranach painting because it has the serpent somewhere lurking. And my Dipped Dick…Adam and Eve After Cranach is very purposefully done with a different palette for each side. If you look at naked men and women in those Adam and Eve paintings, the male always has a darker skin tone, and the woman is always depicted with this light, fragile skin. I’ve always been interested in that visual division.
FW: We’ve talked about “askew” as a formal, compositional device, but of course, it also relates to a person behaving in an off-kilter way. Do you think that to be gleeful, something or someone also needs to be askew? Can you find glee in perfection?
GN: Well, someone might be very gleeful because they are perfect or have put themselves together perfectly [laughter]. That’s not the word that I would use to describe that. If you’re gleeful and you’re askew, you’re having a lot more fun than someone who is perfect. I like the idea of finding a giggle in that you’re all put together, but there’s one thing that might be slightly off. “Is anybody going to notice that I have one thing slightly off?” You know? She’s having fun! And that’s very important.
FW: It’s clear that you’re having fun while painting.
GN: If it isn’t fun, then why bother doing it? Well, sometimes you have to put bread on the table. But it would be nice if you really like what you do and take great pride in what you do.
FW: That comes across in your work. A retrospective, by definition, is looking backward. A career survey. In Jo Applin’s essay in the exhibition catalogue, however, she writes about how your work is always looking forward. Of course, you’re drawing from the past with art historical references, but you’re also very much living in the present and challenging yourself, constantly, to push your practice toward something new. I’m curious how it has been for you to re-encounter sixty years of work during the time we’ve been planning the retrospective.
GN: In looking back over all the things that I’ve done, going back to the very beginning, I’m kind of impressed with how much growth I’ve had. I’ve gotten better at what I do.
FW: Have there been any surprises?
GN: I have gotten extremely proficient in how I handle watercolor. It took a long time to, you know, have your hand translate what your brain wants with the brush and the color and the water and all that kind of stuff. And some of those early watercolors are really nice, but I look at them and think, “Well, if I was doing that now, with what I know how to do and can do with my skill levels, it would be interesting to see what the differences would be.” I appreciate where I’ve been, and I appreciate where I have traveled in terms of how I can handle things. I like to try new things.
With the Plexi paintings from the late-1960s, for example, I discovered the exact right mixture of wetness so that the acrylic doesn’t bead. I mean, those are really pretty damn fine. Plus, they were a lot of fun. I just would take one side of the protective paper and complete the painting and even coat it with a final coat. I would then take the paper off and be surprised by what I saw. It was that element of surprise that I really liked. It was sort of like when your printmaker pulls a print and you see it for the first time. That elation. I love that.
FW: That’s an important aspect of your work. The element of surprise, and a willingness to allow the work to take on a life of its own.
GN: I’m willing to have chance enter into it. Sometimes I talk to my work when I’m alone in my studio. You know, have a dialogue literally and imagine that it’s answering me.
I’ve done a lot of stuff, and I’ve done a lot of good stuff. And I’ve done a lot of stuff with various materials. I have fully conquered what I was doing, and moved on to something else, always returning to paper. I’m constantly playing with doing something that will be different from what I did before but will be a continuance of the same thing. Taking what I have gained and putting it into something else.
FW: Looking backward has allowed you to move forward.
GN: Yes, I’m continually thinking about what I’m doing. I have mental notes, a mental file cabinet that’s just filled with things that are yet to be explored.
This interview was first published as “Gladys Nilsson in Conversation with Francesca Wilmott, May 23, 2025” in Gleefully Askew: A Gladys Nilsson Retrospective (Hirmer Publishers, 2026): pp. 208–213.