“‘Madame Bridgette’
by Clare Woods is another example of an artist enjoying paint as a medium and
is one that you really have to see in the flesh to get a sense of its sumptuous
colour and thick, intense glossy sheen created by its metal surface and use of
gloss/enamel paints.”
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| 'Madame Bridgette' (2005) |
It isn’t everyday that one gets the opportunity to quote
oneself from over ten years ago! This observation was taken from an essay I wrote about
the John Moores Painting Prize in 2006. It was my first (of what has become a
customary tradition) visit to Liverpool and the Biennial whilst a student in my
first year of my Fine Art degree. Fast forward ten years and here I am writing about my
third encounter with Clare Woods’ paintings whose solo show has just opened at
Taunton’s Hestercombe Gallery. The quote is important, not just sentimentally,
nor in its apparent use of stating the obvious, but taps into a time when I knew
a lot less about art so was more instinctive and open-minded in my opinions –something
that I am ever conscious of trying to in-part retain.
Therefore, I stick by you, slightly grammatically incorrect essay
quote from 2006! In that vein I begin (though not promising that the grammar
will be much better). Clare Woods is still
an artist that explicitly and almost sculpturally enjoys the stuff of paint (incidentally she
trained as a sculptor at Bath College of art, once describing herself as 'a frustrated sculptor'). In her earlier work especially, paint is wielded like a sculptural medium; poured,
dripped, scraped, smoothed, spread and brushed; these the more gestural of
marks made either with brush or left alone to spread and bleed into other
colours creating cellular meiosis-like pools, as gloss naturally does when
poured onto a flat surface. In other areas of her paintings semi-representational
lines and forms are crisply almost ‘cut’ into the surface creating structure
and shape against the looser expressive marks. Upstairs in the largest room
this is demonstrated with gusto in the devouringly huge (its floor to ceiling
high) painting ‘Monster Field’ (2008).
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| 'Monster Field' (2008) |
The beauty of painting this and many of
her early works on aluminium is that the slick, hard surface is perfect for
creating those pools of paint and manipulation of it with brush or palette
knife, yet possibly what is the most impressive in this work is the intense use
of colour and dynamic composition. Some of Wood’s later paintings become more
murky and muddy in their colour palette and feel less pleasing visually than
the vibrancy and energy of paintings like ‘Monster Field’ (but perhaps offer a
truer depiction of natural landscape colours?). They are ‘high’ colour as my friend (a
painter) pointed out to me; as though someone has boosted the contrast
and intensity settings on a digital image to dangerous levels of distortion.
That distortion being another crucial factor in Woods' paintings which are ‘derived
from photographs’ and sit mostly in abstraction but have representational forms
within them that suggest fences, bracken, shrubbery, trees, hills or plough
furrows. These colours, mark making and forms are in-turn composed into an
energetic outcome that is almost musical in the way it is rhythmically paced to
lead your eye around its surface. If these are influenced and inspired from the
natural landscape then they are heightened and ambiguous; open to numerous
interpretations from their viewers, but in their passion for paint and drama seem to fit
their being likened to the Romantic tradition of painting.
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| 'Cemetery Bends' (2009) |
In ‘Cemetery Bends’ (2009) the wavering between abstraction
and representation is clearer and with a darker element of moodiness to it that
suggests an eerie, strange forest; fantasy mixed with darkness of the likes of the Brothers Grimm. Although the
majority of Woods' paintings are relatively flat they have depth in their
layers of applied paint as well as a reflective depth created from the sheen of
the enamel and gloss paint which make interesting surfaces to explore for
longer. Some of this layering and cutting (referred to earlier) ties Woods' paintings closer to that of the Danish born artist, Per Kirkeby, whose
paintings she cites as looking at. I too first remember seeing Per Kikeby’s
paintings in a solo exhibition at Tate Modern in 2009, they are heavily
inspired by geology, soil and the landscape and in many cases on as an
ambitious scale (and even bigger) as Clare Woods. In Kirkeby’s case, some of his paintings almost
burry you alive in their enormity and it’s the larger scale Woods’ paintings
that I think work best. They envelope the viewer with their glistening surfaces
and intimacy of the luxuriousness of the paint, yet at the same time they push
you away with areas of hard, flatter grid-like lines and angles that suggest a
more desolate vision of landscape than a thriving one.... For a long time I
battled with deciding whether Wood’s paintings were too slick or whether I was
reading too much into the type of paint rather than looking at the way it was
manipulated; because when one looks at the actual painting within them they
feel a lot more anxious and intuitive than being dismissed as pretty patterns
and I have come to like them more after reading of the artist’s relationship to
making her paintings; “Anxiety and fear are in the background of
everything I do...I think that’s what keeps me going there’s always a fear.
There’s always a fear of something.”* In this way the work becomes more
like reading a Rorschach blot in being open to interpretation.
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| 'The Last Best Hope' (2014) |
In another room there are a series of works influenced by
First World War landscapes and ideas around painters such as Paul Nash; the
tension in these being slightly different to that of the more overtly landscape
ones. I’d love to know if Clare Woods paints with a title in mind or whether
the title comes after? As with these and nearly all her works, the title either
anchors or shifts how the work is then viewed. I prefer looking without knowing
the title first.
Overall though in this retrospective, I think I like the earlier paintings better, the
most recent being done completely in oil and on a more chromatic colour scale
(i.e. tones of pink or yellow). These newer works feel so different and less
lively so don’t really captivate my attention in the same way as the earlier
pieces. Similarly the more representational her paintings get the less I feel
drawn in. A nest, a head, a figure; whilst still abstract the more recognisable
they are, the more clumsy they feel, and less sculptural in my opinion because
they become less about the paint and more about the image. There is something
familiarly 'Francis Bacon-like' in the layering of paint and composition of space
in the newer paintings but I’m not quite sure if they feel finished or like a
step in the beginning of a new direction? They are all, however, works of an
artist who is exploratory, thinking and adapting so it will be interesting to
see where using oils takes Woods next.
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| 'Untitled Diptych Part I' (2002) |
At Hestercombe Clare Woods’ paintings feel more ambitious
and more confrontational in their ‘wildness’ in contrast to the softer, well kept
formal gardens behind the house, but in keeping with the grandness of John
Bampfylde’s landscaping elsewhere. There is a lot to see and mostly it works
really well except for the oil paintings on the stairs which I’ve already expressed that I'm not keen on
anyway (but may be too far away to be seen) and one piece that fights with slightly
awkward lighting and a purple ceiling. I think much has to be said as well for
the windows of the gallery which at each exhibition have adopted their own matching
detail; in this show appropriately in the form of a long red paint streak. Above
all however I stress as I observed in 2006, the importance of seeing these
works in person, as reproductions in photos does not quite do them justice.
Like the Tania Kovats exhibition last year at Hestercombe and Michael Simpson at Spike, it
should not be taken lightly how fortunate and important it is that the South
West has access to these relevant, contemporary and inspiring shows and two of them being from painters! I think
Clare Woods’ exhibition at Hestercombe rises to this without question.
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