Alan Wood

Alan Wood’s recent exhibition “Dreams and Memories” at the Winsor Gallery in Vancouver marked his much anticipated return after a lengthy absence from the public eye. As the exhibition title implies, the work, all dated 2008, was centred on imaging the past. To remember something requires constructing some sort of image that adequately corresponds to it, and in this new body of work it would seem the power of past experiences demanded the artist affect an uncharacteristic level of literality to achieve that correspondence.

Those readers familiar with Alan Wood’s practice know the extent to which he draws upon formal abstract metaphors and ciphers to picture his world transformed: cut up, coloured and glued-onto canvas collage paintings, works on paper, and mixed-media assemblages. Nature plays a big part in his world, pictured like a kindred spirit, or spirits, inhabiting ocean waves, forest, rocks, sandy beaches, meadows, storm clouds, clear skies, waterfalls and rushing rivers. Once again, the natural world features prominently in the artist’s recent body of work, since it is the context for place and time in the memories and dreams shared between him and his late wife Flora MacLeod. The artist’s absence from the studio and exhibition halls the past few years is explained by his dedication to a private life of caring for his ailing wife, who passed away in 2006 from multiple sclerosis. The artist’s relationship with Flora was clearly the deciding factor in the much more literal translations of making images of the past in this exhibition.

In the acrylic on paper collage called Island and Figure (Galiano), for example, the artist has used a spare line drawing, reminiscent of Matisse, to depict Flora lying on a blanket on the beach. This direct figurative representation, variations of which occur in other collages as well, embodies both an individual and universal female identity. In its depiction, the figure of the woman is neither an exemplar of essentialism nor iconicity; its particularity, reductive as it is, speaks to the everyday narrative of the subject’s life, the artist’s life as re-lived in memory, and our own lives for that matter, as something already known. For all the apparent abstraction in Wood’s collage works, his use of colour, line, and shape is often closely indexed to subject matter, some of which are self-evident, such as the sandycoloured plane that the aforementioned figure reclines on, or the flat, blue, central glyph-like shape, inside of which floats an angular green-brown topographical shape. If you read water and island into this latter example, you’re on the right track. Other subject-object relationships are less easily read—for example the small bright orange rectangle on the upper promontory of the “island.” This, the artist has told me, represents the cottage he and Flora owned on Galiano Island. Colour and collage are two of Alan Wood’s greatest strengths; so much so, it might be argued, that in the combined use of those components he has few equals in contemporary art today.

Collage is an art of juxtaposition, of combining disparate parts into a new synthesis—an art whose compositional syntax almost demands a collision of parts, of edges grating against each other, of colours conversing in multiple voices across the picture plane. The trajectory of Wood’s evolution as a colourist is subject for a discussion, but it’s fair to assume that the prominent role of collage in his practice has contributed to his complex and adventurous approach to colour composition. While Island and Figure (Galiano) is infused by an overriding atmosphere of tranquility, the tenor of River, Beach, and Isolated Figure might be characterized as existing at a threshold of causality, where the dramatic crosscutting of colour and collage both heightens and complicates narrative readings of cause and effect. In this work, a large dark massing of colours seem poised to envelope the entire composition, and yet the luminous gold-hued rectangular space in the upper right quadrant, possessed of a quite different but no less powerful energy, mergers the forceful conjunction into a kind of spiritual equilibrium. In the middle of this golden light-filled space, the artist has drawn an image of Flora. Seated in an armchair, her head rests on a pillow, her legs are covered by a blanket the colour of the space that she occupies, and her blouse is blue like the river that winds its way through the dark landscape over which she floats in a dream.

The collage effect of meaning in the dissonance and harmony of materials, opticality, the real and the imaginary has underwritten some of the best art of the modern and contemporary eras. Alan Wood’s contribution to that history and its continued discourse is secure, and now, with his recent return to art from a self-imposed exile, we are further reminded of just how relevant this conceptual and aesthetic paradigm is to our present moment. ❚

Alan Wood’s “Dreams and Memories” was exhibited at the Winsor Gallery in Vancouver from November 13 to December 7, 2008.

Gary Pearson is an artist and Associate Professor in the Department of Creative Studies at UBC Okanagan, in Kelowna, BC.