Brian Wood

Given the resilience of Brian Wood’s approach to painting and prolificacy over the years, it’s remarkable to witness all that can be mined from what might appear to be a narrow inner resource: consciousness. Maybe this is because we are now hapless consumers — or targets of — so much multi-media imagery, even producing it ourselves for second and third digital lives online. Interiority of the self is now a far away place, while the discipline of self-interrogation, facing the uncertainty of digging into the stratum of thought itself, was never an easy, or finalized, task. Yet this is where Brian Wood makes his way. 

A through line in Wood’s work is the come-and-go relationship to figural depictions, where the counterpoint to representation is not abstraction, as some writers have proposed — a philosophy of non-representation or optical fragmentation — but instead a mental loosening of the paint’s particular referents. This approach is easily verified in Wood’s ink and silver-print photograph admixtures from the early 90s. Black-and-white silver prints of not-readily-identifiable subjects are embedded within a washy and lyrical field of manipulated ink. Two historically contradicting mediums, here, serve the same unpremeditated ends, with unclear boundaries, in unison. 

In the single medium of oil paint — and take “single” with a grain of salt, as oil painting is possibly alchemical — Wood’s means of pictorial differentiation operates on two planes. First is the vacillations of referential resolution. Is this a bone? Maybe, but if it is not, the answer is not nothing; nor is it “only paint.” The second is a versatility of the brushwork, or mark making, in intensity and variation. So fluid is the artist’s dexterous range that, without any implicit referent behind the marks, one might see only a surface bravura — and yet that never happens. Explosions next to self-effacing scrapes, or saturated oranges next to muted blue grays, are entirely organic orchestrations.  

Yes, those bones are bones in Wood’s acrylic and oil on paper Darling (2021). Center left is a sideways cranial form at a three-quarters angle — in portrait-painting parlance — with discrete skeletal features coming forward into the lower right corner. But across the way, in the upper left, is an echoing curvature in light seafoam green. This color, in its arched expanse, has the feeling of an airy, liquidic wave of life, in contrast to the density and hardness of color-less bones. We are trafficking in senses, not signs, to sustain the fluctuations of experience. Think of the way great vocalists can turn words into aural shapes and their voices into instruments, delivering a soundscape rather than a song. The lyrics become not referential propositions, but instead vessels for texture, mood, and sensation. 

First Word (2020), a small oil on linen work, is looser in line, with few hard edges, trading in more graphical elements for scumbling and dry-brush impasto. The eye is led into and out of vortices by way of high-impact color and visual rhythm, which is a more choreographic manner of composing than employing linear sections, the tradition hard-edge abstraction took. “First Word” as a title can direct us to “things”; yet it operates as a verb — “Let there be light” — where something, or everything, is made of nothing: ex nihilo.  

We are in a moment where mainstream artwork is ever more crisp and clear in its subject matter and stylization, sufficient to have its entirety as work be instantly and fully legible in tiny photographic form, darting across a phone’s screen. The needs for this bounding of form and content — I hope — are temporary, ascribable to urgent political messaging and temporary inabilities to experience art in person. The history of Brian Wood’s approach to painting, its consistency of method and quality, ensures that when the moments unfold, when individuals are open to be vulnerable before an artwork’s inarticulable and unpredictable experience — to suspend their distrust — the paintings seen here, and yet to be made, will resonate more strongly than they ever have before. 

— Rob Colvin