Muralist Rae Wilson explores ‘imaginative nature’ in her work: Made in Arizona

Rae Wilson’s murals and paintings are full of life and color. She calls it imaginative nature.

In her latest work — and largest ever — she’s painted a mural that’s wrapped around the Roosevelt Street and Central Avenue light rail station called "Travelers."

It’s part of her work as Artlink Phoenix’s Fall 2025 Spotlight Artist and it features the top half of five of her friends’ faces, so you can see the smile in their eyes, as she described it. Above of their heads there are birds — quail, an owl, a cactus wren, a raven.

It’s realistic and abstract at once. And it celebrates the desert — even for a transplant from the Midwest. The Show spoke with her more about the mural and how she got here.

Rae Wilson

Full conversation

RAE WILSON: My mom put me in these Bob Ross-sponsored oil painting classes when I was 10 years old. And so that’s my first experience of painting. And I picked it back up in like 2015. I had left college. I dropped out. I was studying interior architecture, and I was bored to tears.

And when I got back home to my childhood bedroom, I found old canvases and paint. So I just picked it right back up. And so, for the past, I guess 10 years I would say, I’ve been extremely consistent and really fallen in love with it.

LAUREN GILGER: And you’ve had internships, partnerships, lots of fellowships, your artist-in-residency and all of these things to grow your work here. How did you end up in Arizona?

WILSON: I had a lot of seasonal depression living in Chicago. It was just too cold for too long, and I kind of had my eye on a few different places that might be more weather friendly for me. And Arizona was one of those places on the list.

And so during COVID, I happened to meet my now-spouse online, who lived here in Phoenix. And I was like, “OK, now I have a reason to visit.” And I visited. I visited for a week, and after a week I was like, “Oh, I think I can do this.” And so eight months later, I was here, and now it’s been four years.

GILGER: Wow. OK. So being a transplant, it sounds like, pops up in your work a little bit in terms of your subject matter. In what way does it come out? How do you think about your role here as a transplant in the desert?

WILSON: I feel like I have some sort of responsibility to represent many identities and many, like, facets of the world. When I first moved to Arizona, maybe like the first couple of weeks, I was like, “Oh no, maybe I made a mistake.”

I felt like it was really difficult to meet people because of how spread out things were. And like, it kind of seemed like everyone was already in their social groups. And it felt really challenging just to kind of be integrated in community.

And I was like looking for other people who had similar stories as me, people who come from other places, people of various identities. And as an artist, if I have the ability to speak about what it’s like to be new in a space or to reinvent yourself. I’m always looking to do that in my work.

GILGER: Yeah, I like that. Do you feel like you’ve been able to reinvent yourself here?

WILSON: Maybe not reinvent, but maybe refine. I feel like being here has really grown me in a way. I think that struggle of looking for community kind of forced me into building it and fostering it.

And I feel like I do that in the ways that, like, I teach art classes in a lot of different spaces around the city, and I lead sketching tours. And I just feel like I am constantly looking to make people feel like they’re at home.

GILGER: Yeah. That’s a good way to make yourself feel at home, I’m sure

WILSON: Yeah. It works.

GILGER: So let me ask you a little bit about your process. One of the things I read that you like to do in your process is painting through all of the phases of a piece, like layering it on a canvas. Describe how that works and what it does to the final product.

WILSON: Yeah. All of my paintings start extremely loose. I like to start more with an idea and less of, like, a hard-copy sketch. I sometimes will work from photographs, and I’ll combine one or more photographs. And my only goal is to get the main subject in there, and then I’m kind of letting the background develop itself.

I’m happy to make mistakes all along the way. Usually a lot of artists will work background to foreground, but I’m usually foreground to background. And in that way, the piece really does develop itself. There are all these brushstrokes that were like, “Oh, I shouldn’t have done that,” or “that was unintentional,” or “maybe that color was too strong.”

But because I am also limiting how much I am erasing things, it leaves a little bit of a piece of everything that I’ve done in each painting. And so what ends up coming out is something that looks a little bit surreal or just kind of wonky. And I’m happy with that. I’m like, “OK, this is fine, because it’s telling a story.” It’s like appreciating the journey to this final piece.

GILGER: I like that. You often use circles in your work and kind of other geometric shapes at times too. Why is that?

WILSON: Well, that also started as an accident. My first use of the circle was to cover up an area that I was unhappy with. But then that circle kind of connected to space is on the canvas. It was, again, a cactus painting. This is before I ever moved to Arizona. I was painting, a cactus.

And when I put this circle behind it, it kind of connected the background and the cactus together. And I thought, “Wow, that was really cool. I think I can do that on purpose.” And so now any time I feel like there’s any sort of, like, empty space or just dead space on the canvas where I’m like, “I know this section doesn’t look very good, or maybe it needs something,” a circle has never failed me.

And I feel like that circle of just creating the connection really speaks to I think what I’m trying to convey in my work, that everything is sort of circular and things do come back around. And it’s kind of just my life mantra is that everything is a circle.

GILGER: Everything is a circle. I like that. You obviously use a lot of nature. Your portraiture is in there a lot. I saw the phrase “imaginative nature” when I was reading about you — what does that look like?

WILSON: Yeah. At some point, I just start making it up. So I’ll look at a reference photo, and I’m like, “OK, yeah. This is a good start.” And then at some point I just becomes — I don’t know — just this totally like, this is not exactly the reference photo.

So I’ll play around with the colors. Like if it’s a lime green, I’m like, “I don’t know, maybe this should be blue-green instead.” Or I just really allow myself so much space and just a lot of grace to work with my mistakes in my artwork.

GILGER: I mean, it kind of makes you think about the definition of a mistake in art, right? Like, is it really a mistake?

WILSON: And there’s this great, quote. And I don’t know who said it, but it’s “Art is about the mistakes that you keep.” And I tell my students that all the time. Like, that’s 100% right. Just try it out. If it doesn’t work, you can probably use some part of it at least. And so I really try to stick with that.

GILGER: Yeah. Okay. So let me ask you lastly then Rae, what you want to do with this. It sounds like you plan on being in Phoenix for some time at least, and making your mark here. Where do you want to take your career?

WILSON: I have a really big heart for community and art being accessible. And so I have a really big dream of fostering that in some way. So, I don’t know, like community art workshops that are, like, low barriers to entry. Storytelling workshops for people who have, like, complex stories to tell. In some way, I just really want to be really well integrated in my community and be able to lead art in a way that gives people a voice to their own stories.

I don’t really know what that looks like right now, or I guess how to get there, but that is what I want to do. I just want to share art with community.

GILGER: It sounds like you’re well on your way.