! ! Duncan Wood ________________________________________________
! Trunk Series - 2001-2007 and ongoing !
The source of this series of paintings was first conceived in the1980’s and 1990’s but represented then only by a few drawings and two or three paintings not shown here. The initial idea in part, came from an interest in making paintings that adhered to a naturalistic and figurative way of working, directly from life, whilst also looking for increasingly abstracted subject matter. Work that would not be easily assimilated and that would engender certain recognition from the viewer, but at the same time intimations of something unknown and new; Something that also, it turned out, merged the three genre of still life, landscape and the figure.
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Tree trunks were the chosen vehicles for attempting to achieve this strange 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. Although I did not want my subject matter and composition to be easily digested, I did want colour to remain, as far as possible, “ the colour of life..”, as Lucian Freud put it. Perhaps I am in part, drawn to tree trunks, as opposed to the whole tree, as the slow sedimentary phenomena of individual trees – 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 sense, 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 article ‘Steps Towards A Small Theory of The Visible’ (1997):
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“ 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 ”
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Duncan Wood, August 2011
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Trunk 2, Oil On Canvas, 29.7 x 29.7 Inches
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Trunk 1, Oil On Canvas, 29 x 29 Inches
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Trunk 8, Oil, 29.5 x 29.5 Inches
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Trunk 4, Oil On Canvas, 30 x 30 Inches
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Trunk 9, Oil On Canvas, 28.5 x 28,5 Inches
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Trunk 5, Oil On Canvas, 30 x 30 Inches The Duke of Devonshire and The Chatsworth Settlement Trustees (Lismore Castle)
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Trunk 7, Oil On Canvas, 31.7 x 28.6 Inches