The Overzealous Artist: Christopher Winslow

I have received almost as many comments about the sets of my two plays, “Baltimore, You Have No Idea,” and “Baltimore Docket,” as I have about the performances, and for good reason: The designer and artist, Christopher Winslow, and the set carpenter, Gary Flowers, went above and beyond my expectations for scenery.

They are two more reasons why I feel very fortunate: The fellow travelers on my side trip into playwriting have all committed to these projects and, for each run, worked hard to give audiences as professional a production as can be mustered on a Baltimore stage.

Gary Flowers is an experienced set builder (and luthier) while Chris Winslow is one of the most versatile artists I’ve ever met. He seems to be capable of anything — a serious portrait, a whimsical painting, murals, decorative art, and his skill at trompe l’oeil astonished everyone when we saw the flats for “Baltimore Docket.”

He created the optical illusion of courtroom paneling on quarter-inch sheets that Flowers cut for him. Winslow created the effect of Palladian windows on either side of the stage and worked with the lighting tech to create the illusion of daylight and the silhouettes of nearby trees.

I was stunned when he memorialized filmmaker John Waters and William Donald Schaefer, the late Baltimore mayor and Maryland governor, as judges in portraits hung in our on-stage courtroom.

Winslow lives in North Baltimore and works in a studio over his garage.

“My childhood and early adult life was spent traveling the world with my wandering parents,” he offers in a brief autobiographical summation. “England, Papua New Guinea and Ireland were some of the countries we lived in for extended periods of time, and where I went to school, including four years of art college in Ireland. In 1986, I moved to Baltimore and started a career as a decorative painter. Murals, commissioned paintings, portraits as well as stenciling and faux finishing, have kept me very busy and traveling for the past 37 years.”

In his spare time, Winslow roams around on a motorcycle and has produced some great photography in his travels.

Last year, some of his personal works with brushes appeared in a gallery show at Manor Mill in Monkton, Md.

The show included a brilliant painting, “A Curious Coi,” and a triptych inspired by farms and churches in the Sparks and Monkton areas of Baltimore County.

“I try,” he said at the time, “to capture an intimacy of place and time in landscape, when a sacred moment is revealed.”

We are lucky to have Winslow and Flowers building and painting our sets, and I thank them profusely for the extra effort. Winslow calls himself an “overzealous artist.” But I think, with full admiration and affinity, that he just wants to reach perfection, to create his own “sacred moments” with paint and brush.