Lisa Wood

Lisa Wood has been a figurative painter for a while now. As a thesis student at the University of Manitoba’s School of Art, and in the Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art mentorship program with printmaker Aurora Landin, as well as through graduate school and beyond, her commitment has been to the figure. The female figure, in fact: her self, her other self and her mother.

Wood’s first public exhibition, after completing an MFA in painting at Yale, was in the “Supernovas” show held at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Guest curators Lori Millan and Shawna Dempsey selected Wood’s larger works on the themes of twins, including the artist in a man’s singlet. It was self-portraiture made in front of the mirror, three by four feet. It wasn’t until I saw her new little oil studies on Mylar at Gallery 803, in the heart of the west end industrial zone—studies that shine and sing—that I realized Ms Wood had found her materials, her scale, her subject and her ground.

So what has changed? On the face of it, the new work is still centred on the female form. But the need for the artist/subject to address the viewer through the direct gaze has vanished. Wood was born after feminist fi lm theorist Laura Mulvey’s historic question was posed. In these new studies, where the sleepers’ eyes are closed, there is none of the latent aggression that came as a caution against residual discussions of “the female gaze.” Yet, even though the subjects sleep, their lack of awareness does not make their bodies vulnerable or docile. As the artist notes, it’s about comfort. But it’s also about a wonderful tension between turning away from the world while being relentlessly held in its material, corporeal grasp. Wood’s vigilance in not exploiting the female body as a site for another’s commodification and sexualization has shifted into a different kind of vigilance. It’s an advancement of formal considerations.

To hear Wood speak about changes in her painting practice— improving the quality of her materials, creating studies in digital photography before progressing into paint, using the camera for cropping, searching for surfaces that would mimic the luminosity of oil on vellum—is to recognize that hers is a painting practice that criticizes its own development.

In her former position as director of a local photo-based arts centre, Lisa Wood had been surrounded by photography in all its forms. In her new series, entitled “Absorbed,” she uses digital technology to prepare her compositions, freeing up her own gaze in real time, and tightening up the edges and the diagonals to pack in more tonal and dimensional shifts in shallower depths. In the past she never planned her compositions. Of her older paintings she said, “I started with the nose and worked out.” In “Absorbed,” it’s a tight focus on portraiture—the artist and her lover in bed during that dreamy netherworld between sleeping and waking.

It’s advancement by form, like a perfect resolution of Clement Greenberg’s understanding about the formal self-scrutinies of Modernism, meeting Gustave Courbet with his nude in his studio—the L’Origine du monde, in a slightly different historical unfolding. The nude, realism, the female body and photography’s impact on painting—all are relevant here. But in the end, it’s gorgeous painting that matters. The small studies at Gallery 803 are nestled in the back room of the Elan furniture store, where curator Janice Rosen has been exhibiting a slough of really good art for the past two years— both established and emerging artists. The 12 small works, measuring about 9 by 12 inches, are all heads in beds, hung in three horizontal groups. Head to pillow, hand to cheek, cheek to linen, cheek to cheek, flushed with slow, glowing heat that seems to emanate somewhere from beneath the flesh. Two large diptychs accompany the small oils, where an expanse of linen matches the sleepers’ heads. It’s some of the most stunning and surprising figurative painting in western Canada.

Wood has achieved her sweet and subtle modulations through shifts in colour, using “five or six of the best quality oils”—Alizarin crimson, Prussian blue, Italian pink, zinc white, and cadmium red. Almost her whole palette is based on these colours, with a freshness that comes from the practice of creating each study at one extended sitting. Wood talks a lot about paint—about good pigment, nice binder, the way Rubens could make red look green—and how ordinary time is suspended in an Alice Munroe story.

In “Absorbed,” Wood is more confident and accomplished than ever. The guard has been dropped. The sensuality of the material is celebrated after certain and steady struggle. The subject lies dreamily at the heart of the matter. Indeed, it is an homage to the artist’s intended story about “comfort and ultimate vulnerability,” but also one about ambition and strength. ■

Lisa Wood’s “Absorbed” was exhibited at Gallery 803 in Winnipeg from August 9 to September 6, 2007.

Amy Karlinsky writes, curates and teaches from Winnipeg.