Duncan Wood
Duncan Wood Derivations and New Directions 13 November – 5 December 2013
Monday - Friday 10.00 - 5.30 Saturday 11.00 - 2.00
Browse & Darby 19 Cork Street London W1S 3LP Tel: 020 7734 7984 Fax: 0207851 6650 email: art@browseanddarby.co.uk www. browseanddarby.co.uk
I have a great deal to be indebted to Lucian Freud for, since he painted all my close family, but in addition it was he who introduced me to Duncan Wood’s work. This was really a great favour. Duncan’s paintings of trees are unusual and when looking at them one is permeated by a sense of calm. I am delighted to have three of his works and hope to have more in the not too distant future. Andrew Devonshire, Letter from Chatsworth, October 2003
I found your trunk series interesting and rather eerie - I have spent a good deal of time gazing at birch trees, even taking photographs in hopes of working out why I find them so compelling and, yes, eerie. I remember being stranded on a stuck train in the midst of birches in Germany once and I didn’t mind being stuck at all - in fact, I didn’t want to leave. John Burnside to Duncan Wood, St Andrew’s University (E-mail), October 2011
DUNCAN WOOD 1960 Born 1980-81 Gloucestershire College of Art and Design 1981-84 Sheffield Hallam University, BA (Hons) Fine Art 1996-97 London University, the Institute of Education 2001-03 The City and Guilds of London Art School, MA Fine Art Currently Tutor at The Prince’s Drawing School, London Selected Exhibitions 1986 The City Art Galleries (Graves), Sheffield 1989-95, 2001-05 Fosse Gallery, Stow-on-the-Wold 1991, 97 Albany Gallery, Cardiff 1991-92, 96, 99 The Discerning Eye, Mall Galleries, London 1993, 96, 98 Summer Show, Royal Academy, London 1993-94 Making a Mark, Drawing Symposium, London 1994, 2005 The Hunting Art Prize, Royal College of Art, London and touring 1994 The City Art Galleries, Glasgow and touring 1995 Christie’s, King Street, London 1995 The City Art Galleries, Nottingham 1996 The Fine Art Society, London 1998-99 The National Trust (East Midlands Region), artist in residence 1998 The Royal West of England Academy, Bristol 2001 Paintings in Hospitals, Christie’s, King Street, London 2001, 03, City and Guilds of London Art School 2002 NEAC Auction, Sotheby’s, New Bond Street, London 2003/4 Atlantic, Fosterart Ltd, London, in association with the Howard Scott Gallery, New York 2005 Bankside Gallery, London 2006-8 Memories of Andrew Devonshire, Chatsworth and on tour to Buxton Museum & Art Gallery 2007-13 Contemporary Gallery Artists, Browse & Darby, London 2008 Threadneedle Art Prize, London, finalist 2011 ING Discerning Eye, London. Invited by Brian Sewell. Prize-winner 2013 Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Competition, Kings Place Gallery, London Public Collections The Duke of Devonshire and the Chatsworth Settlement Trustees The Finnish Embassy The National Trust Sheffield Hallam University
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Trunk Series 2001 - 2007
_________________________________________ The source of this series of paintings was conceived in the1980s and 1990s and was a group of a few drawings and two or three paintings, including Tree Trunk, Chatsworth (1983). The idea for the current series came from an interest in making work directly from life whilst also looking for increasingly simplified, abstracted subject matter. I wanted to produce work that would engender recognition from the viewer, but at the same time intimations of something unknown and new. This work, it turned out, also merged the genres of still life, landscape and the figure.
Tree trunks lent themselves to attempting to achieve this dual sense. I am attracted to the painterly qualities of the bark of certain trees, looking for particular corporeal characteristics, marks, nodules and areas of focus; a balance between space and detail, energy and calm. The colour remains as far as possible ‘the colour of life’, as Lucian Freud put it. Perhaps I am drawn to tree trunks as opposed to the whole tree as the slow sedimentary phenomena of the individual tree - ancient equivalents of animal and human bodies. The trunk sections are taken from their exterior world into the interior world of the studio and artificially side-lit, lending them a surreal and dislocated quality, setting a tension between the organic and the human-made. These paintings are risky in the sense that they purposefully allow the subject and its colour, once chosen, to dictate the outcome of each picture. In other words I place an unusual amount of reliance on the subject matter, a kind of reception by letting go. As John Berger put it in his essay Towards A Small Theory of The Visible (1997): The modern illusion concerning painting, that post-modernism has done nothing to correct, is that the artist is a creator. Rather, he is a receiver. What seems like creation is in fact the act of giving form, to what he, or she has received. Duncan Wood, November 2013
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Collection of the Duke of Devonshire and the Chatsworth Settlement Trustees, Chatsworth
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1.
Begonia I, oil on canvas, 16 x 16 inches
2.
Red Still Life II, oil on canvas, 12 x 15 inches
3.
Untitled, Dried Leaves, oil on canvas, 10 x 12 inches
4.
Begonia II, oil on canvas, 15 ½ x 15 ¾ inches
5.
Wild Flowers, Interiorscape, August, oil on canvas, 16 x 16 inches
6.
Advertisement, oil on canvas, 13 x 15 inches
7.
Wild Flowers, Interiorscape, oil on canvas, 20 x 20 inches
8.
Still Life with Pink Background, oil on canvas, 29 ¾ x 23 ½ inches
9.
Urban Sunset, oil on canvas laid on board, 23 ½ x 23 ½ inches
10.
From the Hope Valley, Derbyshire, oil on canvas, 18 x 21 ¾ inches
11.
Tree Trunk in Snow, oil on board, 19 x 15 ¼ inches
12.
Burbage Brook, oil on canvas, 12 x 16 inches
13.
High Rake, oil on canvas laid on board, 7 ½ x 14 ¼ inches
14.
Across the Hope Valley, oil on board, 11 ¼ x 14 ½ inches
15.
Across the Hope Valley (Snow), oil on board, 9 ½ x 12 ¼ inches
16.
Across the Hope Valley II, oil on board, 9 ½ x 12 ¼ inches
17.
High Rake II, oil on paper laid on board, 9 x 13 inches
18.
September Fog, watercolour, 6 ½ x 9 inches
19.
Sheffield from Bingham Park, watercolour, 7 x 9 inches
20.
Red Still Life, oil on canvas, 15 ¼ x 15 ¼ inches
21.
Yellow Flowers with Interior Landscape, oil on canvas, 15 ¼ x 15 ¼ inches
22.
Trunk 10, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches
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Trunk 2, oil on canvas, 25 x 25 inches
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Trunk 1, oil on canvas, 24 ¼ x 23 ¼ inches
25.
Trunk 8, oil on canvas, 24 ¾ x 24 ¾ inches
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Trunk 4, oil on canvas, 25 ¼ x 25 ¼ inches
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Trunk 9, oil on canvas, 23 ¾ x 23 ¾ inches
28.
Trunk 7, oil on canvas, 27 x 23 ¾ inches
29.
Trunk 3, oil on canvas, 25 x 24 inches
30.
Tree Trunk, Chatsworth, oil on canvas, 17 ¾ x 17 ¾ inches
Browse & Darby 19 Cork Street London W1S 3LP