Brian Wood’s Art Beyond Thought
Eleanor Heartney
“The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance.
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.”
—Wallace Stevens, Of Mere Being, 1954
Wallace Stevens’ poem, Of Mere Being, is a paean to the ineffability of the poetic imagination. It provides an incandescent image of those feelings that hover tantalizingly “at the end of the mind,” not yet tugged and flattened by the operations of reason into verbalizable thoughts. Though a master of words, Stevens spent his life exploring what they couldn’t do. His poems live in the gap between the intelligible and the intuitive, or, as he put it in another poem, between “the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
Brian Wood inhabits this same territory. His paintings originate in what he described in a 1994 interview as the “prelinguistic roots of consciousness.” They balance on the cusp between abstraction and representation, teasing us with details that seem sharp and tangible but refuse to cohere into any definitive image or narrative. In this they resemble the operations of memory. Breaking loose from their moorings, fragments of remembered images and ideas float within a sea of inchoate sensations. Wood’s paintings offer us similar glimpses of possibly recognizable things or places, but “human meaning” as Stevens would style it, remains just out of reach.
One sees this, for instance, in Winter of ‘49, a mysterious painting in which organic shapes ripple like wind swept fabric. A pinkish hue gives them erotic and even sexual overtones as they whirl around a suggestively genital orb. The orb radiates a warm light that melts into the surrounding darkness like emanations of a nascent life force. It doesn’t seem a coincidence that the title of this work, with its intimations of form coalescing out of nothingness, makes reference to the artist’s first year of life. End of the Line might be read in terms of the other end of the life cycle. It is dominated by a figural form (complete with two very recognizable shoes and a head dangling from the rope/line of the title) that rises with architectural grandeur to culminate in a mysterious black void. This form is offset on the left of the canvas by a translucent orb materializing out of a glowing field of grayish white – an ethereal presence that might be a realization of Stevens’ “nothing that is.”
These are both monumental works, but Wood’s smaller paintings have a similarly fluid energy as they push and pull the eye between abstraction and representation. Other oppositions are breached as well – passages of pure darkness or light evoke an absolute stillness within otherwise restlessly questing brushstrokes. Shapes and colors suggestive of blood and flesh coexist with shimmering veils of ghostly white.
Sharp talons emerge from softly modeled orbs. Bone like structures appear to bend and sway within liquid fields. Forms are continually morphing into other forms, voids are full of energy and life and colors melt into each other through virtuoso brushwork. Change is the ultimate principle in Wood’s universe.
Wood’s paintings express the kind of dynamically unstable vision of reality that has emerged throughout art history in such anti-classical moments as the Romanesque, the Baroque, Mannerism, Symbolism and Surrealism. What they have in common is a rejection of formal order and visual legibility in favor of more subliminal meanings. In these movements, as in Wood’s work, the carnal melds with the spiritual to knit the mind and the body together into a single entity.
Wood’s dynamic vision is a product of a questing mind. Raised on a farm in northern Saskatchewan, he studied physics, math and music during his student years, and paid for his university education by playing in his own and others’ bands. He arrived in New York in 1969 to pursue a painting career. During this tumultuous cultural moment, he fell in with avant-garde filmmakers Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow whose influence can still be felt in his work. He immersed himself in film-making and pursued montage and photography, gaining recognition for photo collages that mingled abstract ink drawings with cropped photo images. These explorations, built on his resistance to the camera’s single point perspective and film’s linear progression, contain the seeds of his current work. But eventually, Wood found his way back to drawing and painting, where he could create a world that more accurately represented the fullness of experience.
Wood’s paintings are also indebted to his affinity for poetry. Along with Wallace Stevens, he professes his admiration for visionary poets like William Blake, William Butler Yeats and Rainer Maria Rilke. He also follows contemporary poetry. In a collaboration with American poet Robert Kelly, Wood’s paintings become the inspiration for lyrical meditations on history, mythology, magic and the nature of art. In one of these poems, Kelly says “resemblances are the death of art,” a warning against overly literal interpretations of art or poetry. For both poet and painter, language is not a prison that captures meaning and holds it hostage to logic and reason. Instead, it is a means of opening the mind to the infinite possibilities rippling out from a reality that we will never fully grasp.
Eleanor Heartney, 2017, “Brian Wood Paintings,” Cross Contemporary Art (exhibition catalogue)