Donald Roller Wilson

He created album cover art for musician Frank Zappa during the 1980s and 1990s. Among these: Boulez Conducts Zappa: The Perfect Stranger (1984), Francesco Zappa (1984) and Them Or Us (1984).

Donald Roller Wilson (b. 1938) is an American artist, known for his paintings of people and anthropomorphized chimpanzees, orangutans, cats, and dogs, set in southern gothic interiors, twilight forests, and nocturnal graveyards, often amidst complex still lifes or floral arrangements, with levitating pickles, olives, asparagus, wooden matches, and cigarette butts. His images are often comical and at times disquieting. His paintings are executed using techniques and a style reminiscent of the old masters, or what the artist himself has called "kind of Victorian". He gained national recognition in the mid 1970s and his work is included in the collections of several museums throughout the United States.

The artist wrote "Roller Wilson was born in Houston, Texas on November 23, 1938, 10:55 A.M. His mother, a descendent of German–Dutch Jews who prospered during the Oklahoma Land Rush, had run off and married his father, an Episcopalian wildcatter who had been laying pipe in the Oklahoma plains." He was the youngest of three siblings and significantly younger than his brother and sister, in effect growing up as an only child. His family moved to Nebraska about 1944 where his father started a business that made combine harvesters, and then to Wichita, Kansas, in 1945. His earliest involvement with art was sign painting on trucks. He attended Wichita State University where he earned both B.A. and M.F.A. degrees. After completing his education he spent one year (1966–67) as an Assistant Professor at Peru State College, Nebraska. He moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, in the summer of 1967, "expecting it would be a short-lived venture" as a Professor at the University of Arkansas, although Wilson ended up teaching at the University for eight years. In the mid 1970s he was able to devote himself to painting fulltime, and he and his wife Kathleen, also an artist, have remained in Fayetteville for well over fifty years.