84-year-old Deephaven painter Keith Wilcock wants to spread 'a jolt of joy' with art collection

Bedridden for a year with rheumatic fever during the second grade, Keith Wilcock spent hours upon hours drawing scenes of planes crashing.

His technique grew, and once he returned to school, he made his first painting for its art contest: a pirate ship.

Wilcock's teacher teased him for coloring the boat's sails purple, but his work still took the prize.

"It was far better than anybody else's, I must admit," says Wilcock, 84, chuckling amid dozens of acrylic and watercolor scenes on the walls of his Deephaven home. "And so I've been drawing and painting ever since."

More than seven decades later, the art collector continues to paint. His home is filled with art, making it feel "like being in heaven" to him.

He's surrounded by 300 framed and 200 unframed works of his own and other American painters, along with resined butterflies and the occasional sculpture. In his basement, he has an art studio and there's a backroom to store artworks he can't find space to hang up.

"Come back in a week and you'll see different ones on the walls," Wilcock says, walking through his house.

While it may be Wilcock's collection, the art isn't all for him to keep. It's from his former Wilcock Gallery in Excelsior, which closed in 2015 following his wife's progression of Alzheimer's disease. After losing her last year, he's now selling more pieces of the collection online.

Most of the collection is his own work but it also features 150 pieces from such Minnesota artists as Tom Foty, Jerome Ryan and Kairong Liu. The pieces stretch from large, vibrant landscapes of the North Shore and Lake Minnetonka to stylized nudes and sketches, and scenes from around the world, including Utah, where he grew up.

Prices start at around $500 and can go up to several thousand. A few go for much more, like the $35,400 protest piece from the late Minnesota sculptor Katherine Nash. He keeps the paintings he doesn't want to sell in flat files.

"I'm trying not to be emotionally attached to anything," Wilcock says. "Because if you're a dealer, they always pick ones that you like the best."

Selling online is relatively new for him, having been used to a brick-and-mortar space that people could walk through to purchase works. He's also somewhat skeptical about today's world of prints and social media, where many images are smushed together on a feed instead of standing out alone on a gallery wall. But regardless of the medium of transaction, he's an empath for artists making money from their work.

"He's such a nice guy, he goes and buys one of their paintings half the time," his son Joe recalls of artists' exhibitions in the gallery.

Joe Wilcock was a framer at the Wilcock Gallery and remembers it as a "little mini-stage" where families would equally come to visit and look at paintings and local artists would show their work.

"[Keith] worked hard for me to get me established," says Howard Sivertson, former painter at Sivertson Gallery in Grand Marais, Minn.

Sivertson's works were featured in one of Wilcock Gallery's first shows, and Keith Wilcock currently has one of his paintings, a watercolor titled "Whiskey Jack," for sale at $600.

From his time as a second-grade art fair winner to retired gallery owner, Wilcock also spanned careers as an industrial psychologist, a firm consultant and a prison guard.

The experiences never influenced his art, he said, but they helped him with the business side of working with clients across the world. Now, he's hoping to use his experiences to reach art buyers online.

"It could be somebody who wants to start a new gallery and would have a ready-made inventory," Wilcock says. "And it could be somebody who's a big collector, and here's a chance to get a whole bunch of really nice paintings at a good price."

Longstanding Minnesota gallery owners like Jan Sivertson, Howard's daughter, say selling online was a game changer for their collections. There have even been times when she has been unable to keep up with demand.

After the closing of his gallery, Wilcock cataloged his collection, hired a consultant and began advertising it in American Art Review magazine.

He's even venturing on Instagram soon to get the word out about this collection.

Despite keeping a few, he hopes to do anything to help to avoid having the paintings end up in flea market or church garage sale after he's gone. Wilcock doesn't believe in an afterlife but he does believe in spreading happiness.

"What happens to these after I die?" he asks. "No sense fussing about it. I hope that they arrive in somebody's home who they'll give a little smile to. That's what paintings are for, is to give you pleasure. And so if it's the right painting and it really speaks to you, it'll go on giving. It's not a powerful kind of pleasure, but it's a definite little jolt of joy when you look at a painting that you really love. Anyway, it is for me."

Madison Karas • 612-673-7394