Clare Woods Still Lifes at VFA

The talent and skill of British artist Clare Woods (b. 1972) earned her the honor of Royal Academician in 2022. 

 

 

Woods lives and works in Hereford, England with her family. She has a large studio in an industrial estate in Hereford, where she creates her large oil paintings on gessoed aluminum. Woods also has a room in her studio dedicated to printmaking, complete with a printing press. It is the prints that Woods creates that, to us at VFA, are most intriguing.

 

She begins with a line drawing, a woodcut, and layers each color into the work, creating a painterly, bold and intensely vivid print. 

 

Woods began her career as a sculptor, earning a BA in Fine Art from Bath College of Art and an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmith College in London. She has been collecting photographs for more than thirty years and uses many of them for inspiration. She doesn’t copy the photograph, but uses sections of each to begin her works. 

 

The titles of her paintings and prints come from archived ideas that she writes down and saves. The screenprints with woodblock, available at VFA, were inspired by flowers that Woods received during a hospital stay. She photographed them, not at the peak of their bloom, but as they were beginning to fade, and at night, when they take on a darker tone.

 

Woods doesn’t like to explain the titles she chooses, but leaves it up to the observer of her works to decide their meaning.

 

Clare Woods currently has a solo exhibit at the Night Gallery in Los Angeles, which will be on view through June 8, 2024. The exhibit is called I Blame Nature.

 

Upcoming exhibits are planned at the Norrtälje Kunsthal in Sweden this year, the Martin Asbaek Gallery in Copenhagen in 2025 and at the Towner Eastbourne Gallery in 2026.

 

The works of Clare Woods can be found in the permanent collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Government Art Collection the British Council and the British Airways Collection in London, The Nation Collection of Wales in Cardiff, the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Denmark and other major venues.

 

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 Opuntia, the works of Jake Rockland , are currently on exhibit on our digital platform. The Arizona-based generative artist has a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Arizona and studied Economics at The Paris Institute of Political Studies. He worked briefly as a Senior Software Engineer at Google before becoming the Chief Technical Officer at Art Blocks.

 

 Rockland said that the textured compositions in Opuntia were inspired by the desert, printmaking, quilting and his “grandmothers’ practices of textile work.”

 

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Please contact us if you would like more information about the works of Clare Woods and Jake Rockland available at VFA.

 

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May 29, 2024