“Disquieting”, “disorienting”, “sensuous”, “dangerous and beautiful”, “vibrant, raw and exciting” - all words used to describe the strange, abstracted works of contemporary British painter Clare Woods, whose brand new solo exhibition, Reality Dimmed, opens at the Mead Gallery this month.
Straddling the divide between abstract and figurative art, Woods’ large-scale works use thick, sculptural layers of brightly coloured paint to transform real subjects pictured in found photographs. Close-up, visible brushstrokes distort and break up images, while from a distance, they coalesce into dimly recognisable shapes, like hidden thoughts and feelings slowly surfacing from the subconscious. Indeed, Woods has described her own work as a means of painting out buried anxieties, and the overall effect is startlingly immediate and visceral.
Comparisons have been made to Munch’s “Scream”, and it’s easy to see why; while Woods herself cites artists like Bacon and Guston as influences. But such parallels don’t quite do justice to her distinctive way of working: it’s the method and medium she uses to express her ideas that are uniquely Woodisan. Originally trained in sculpture, she now brings to her painting a sculptor’s eye for three-dimensional form, approaching it as a sort of construction process.
“I use aluminium [as a base] because it’s a very stable, solid structure to paint onto,” she explains. “I always work flat, and because I use quite a lot of paint, if I was working this way onto canvas it would sag.”
When she talks about her influences, she describes the work of other artists in similarly practical terms, honing in on specific details or techniques that she is grappling with, such as a given artist’s use of orange or pink. But her real interest lies in why those choices produce the particular effects they do, on the responses – conscious or otherwise – that they provoke from viewers.
It’s not so much a case of form taking precedence over subject matter, then, as it is a sense that form is content, the means by which an apparently random source image is made to express a personal way of looking at the world – by which, if you like, we’re invited to journey into the Woods…
“I wouldn’t normally disclose my source material directly because it really is just a springboard for the painting. I’m using it as a starting point rather than making direct copies,” she says. “The way I pick an image is, I find a photograph that works on a really practical, formal level, so I know it’s going to be really challenging to paint. The question I’m asking myself is, ‘How am I going to actually structurally form this in paint?’”
“I spent a lot of time trying to work out how all the source material linked up and fitted together, but eventually I realised that it doesn’t at all. It’s quite disparate. The only connection is that it all has some effect on me emotionally or conceptually. For me to want to paint something, it has to have some sort of emotional attachment, and then the act of painting it is a way of breaking that down.”
Critics and commentators on her last exhibition – Victim of Geography at Dundee Contemporary Arts – have picked up on what appears to be a focus on scenes of trauma in her latest work. Where early paintings were predominantly based on her own landscape photography, there’s since been a shift towards exploring human figures and man-made objects and settings through images gathered from magazines, newspapers and online. War zones, hospital corridors and terror attacks are subjects mentioned in reviews, but it’s something that Woods herself downplays.
“There was an image in Dundee that came from September 11, but it’s actually just of a person so you wouldn’t necessarily know that from looking at it. They’re quite ambiguous. One of them was just based on a photograph of a chair,” she says.
The transformation works both ways, then: on the one hand, something as unassuming and everyday as a piece of domestic furniture can take on an uneasy, even sinister appearance, while on the other hand, scenes of genuine horror are cut loose from their original context, reinterpreted and even rendered oddly beautiful through paint.
It’s here that the title of her latest exhibition comes in. Taken from Viktor Frankl’s 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning, the quote refers to his observations of the psychological defence mechanisms employed by Auschwitz prisoners. “Reality dimmed, and all efforts and all emotions were centred on one task: preserving one’s own life and that of the other fellow,” he writes. As a psychiatrist, his own experiences as a Holocaust survivor led to a belief in the importance of finding meaning in even the most brutal forms of existence, and thereby a reason to continue living.
While few can claim to have experience of anything comparable, the idea of finding a means of processing trauma to get on with our lives is surely something to which anyone can relate, and chimes with Woods’ own method of obscuring observed reality to reveal some personal truth.
“I read the book a long time ago, actually, but it’s something that’s really stayed with me – the idea that to really find meaning you have to strip everything away, strip it right back. I often collect titles from reading and hearing things, and this is one of those instances where the two words seemed to really fit what I was thinking about and what I was making at that moment, the notion of abstracting what you’re actually looking at or what you’re feeling.”
Reality Dimmed is at the Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre Monday 8 January – Saturday 10 March.
“Disquieting”, “disorienting”, “sensuous”, “dangerous and beautiful”, “vibrant, raw and exciting” - all words used to describe the strange, abstracted works of contemporary British painter Clare Woods, whose brand new solo exhibition, Reality Dimmed, opens at the Mead Gallery this month.
Straddling the divide between abstract and figurative art, Woods’ large-scale works use thick, sculptural layers of brightly coloured paint to transform real subjects pictured in found photographs. Close-up, visible brushstrokes distort and break up images, while from a distance, they coalesce into dimly recognisable shapes, like hidden thoughts and feelings slowly surfacing from the subconscious. Indeed, Woods has described her own work as a means of painting out buried anxieties, and the overall effect is startlingly immediate and visceral.
Comparisons have been made to Munch’s “Scream”, and it’s easy to see why; while Woods herself cites artists like Bacon and Guston as influences. But such parallels don’t quite do justice to her distinctive way of working: it’s the method and medium she uses to express her ideas that are uniquely Woodisan. Originally trained in sculpture, she now brings to her painting a sculptor’s eye for three-dimensional form, approaching it as a sort of construction process.
“I use aluminium [as a base] because it’s a very stable, solid structure to paint onto,” she explains. “I always work flat, and because I use quite a lot of paint, if I was working this way onto canvas it would sag.”
When she talks about her influences, she describes the work of other artists in similarly practical terms, honing in on specific details or techniques that she is grappling with, such as a given artist’s use of orange or pink. But her real interest lies in why those choices produce the particular effects they do, on the responses – conscious or otherwise – that they provoke from viewers.
It’s not so much a case of form taking precedence over subject matter, then, as it is a sense that form is content, the means by which an apparently random source image is made to express a personal way of looking at the world – by which, if you like, we’re invited to journey into the Woods…
“I wouldn’t normally disclose my source material directly because it really is just a springboard for the painting. I’m using it as a starting point rather than making direct copies,” she says. “The way I pick an image is, I find a photograph that works on a really practical, formal level, so I know it’s going to be really challenging to paint. The question I’m asking myself is, ‘How am I going to actually structurally form this in paint?’”
“I spent a lot of time trying to work out how all the source material linked up and fitted together, but eventually I realised that it doesn’t at all. It’s quite disparate. The only connection is that it all has some effect on me emotionally or conceptually. For me to want to paint something, it has to have some sort of emotional attachment, and then the act of painting it is a way of breaking that down.”
Critics and commentators on her last exhibition – Victim of Geography at Dundee Contemporary Arts – have picked up on what appears to be a focus on scenes of trauma in her latest work. Where early paintings were predominantly based on her own landscape photography, there’s since been a shift towards exploring human figures and man-made objects and settings through images gathered from magazines, newspapers and online. War zones, hospital corridors and terror attacks are subjects mentioned in reviews, but it’s something that Woods herself downplays.
“There was an image in Dundee that came from September 11, but it’s actually just of a person so you wouldn’t necessarily know that from looking at it. They’re quite ambiguous. One of them was just based on a photograph of a chair,” she says.
The transformation works both ways, then: on the one hand, something as unassuming and everyday as a piece of domestic furniture can take on an uneasy, even sinister appearance, while on the other hand, scenes of genuine horror are cut loose from their original context, reinterpreted and even rendered oddly beautiful through paint.
It’s here that the title of her latest exhibition comes in. Taken from Viktor Frankl’s 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning, the quote refers to his observations of the psychological defence mechanisms employed by Auschwitz prisoners. “Reality dimmed, and all efforts and all emotions were centred on one task: preserving one’s own life and that of the other fellow,” he writes. As a psychiatrist, his own experiences as a Holocaust survivor led to a belief in the importance of finding meaning in even the most brutal forms of existence, and thereby a reason to continue living.
While few can claim to have experience of anything comparable, the idea of finding a means of processing trauma to get on with our lives is surely something to which anyone can relate, and chimes with Woods’ own method of obscuring observed reality to reveal some personal truth.
“I read the book a long time ago, actually, but it’s something that’s really stayed with me – the idea that to really find meaning you have to strip everything away, strip it right back. I often collect titles from reading and hearing things, and this is one of those instances where the two words seemed to really fit what I was thinking about and what I was making at that moment, the notion of abstracting what you’re actually looking at or what you’re feeling.”
Reality Dimmed is at the Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre Monday 8 January – Saturday 10 March.