Kenneth Wood painted prolifically throughout a career lasting 70 years, from his youth in the early 1930’s, until shortly before his death in 2008.
The paintings shown here on the website are a selection taken from a much larger body of work. Although the work divides into recognisable periods: Pre-War (1932 - 1939); The War Years (1940 -45); Post-War (1946 - 58); the Advertising & Design Studio Years (1959 - 1987), and Late Years (1988 - 2008), the themes of his work, Landscape & Figures, remain constant, and reinterpreted from one decade to another.
He treated both subjects, to some extent, abstractly, as if to extract an analysis of their forms, without in any way banishing their sensation of beauty. His approach was to treat Form, Line & Colour separately, while allowing them to read simultaneously in a sweeping dance of point, counterpoint movement across each picture plane. This is especially true of his Figurative works, many of which he treated as Friezes, in which pictorial notation becomes almost the equivalent of a musical score.
In his early and middle period paintings, Colour is treated more as an adjunct to enhance Drawing, whereas, in his late works, it becomes more fulsome and concentrated, almost a subject in its own right. Whereas Form, he often treated analytically, almost skeletally, only to be whipped into existence by his virtuoso performances of Line.
In total, his paintings represent a career devoted to an unending visual fascination, coupled with the belief that painting, at its best, is both physically skilful and intellectually ambitious.
