A Page From Keith Wood's Book
Keith Wood, "Non-Fiction 13," 2017
encaustic on paper, 22" x 30”
Keith Wood chose a plucky name for his latest exhibition of abstract work on paper: Non-Fiction. The two dozen or so unframed pieces on view at Gurevich Fine Art in Winnipeg until June 30 aren’t really about anything, he says, though they do resemble pages torn from a book. The title, he adds, “just popped into my head.”
Wood likes ambiguity and avoids naming individual pieces. “The problem with titling is that people start looking for things,” he says. “You know, if you give it a specific title, then they try to find arms and legs.”
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Keith Wood, "Non-Fiction 6," 2017
encaustic on paper, 22" x 30”
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Keith Wood, "Non-Fiction 5," 2017
encaustic on paper, 22" x 30”
His art is process driven, so he has little idea where he’s headed when he starts working. But he’s mainly interested in formal pictorial elements like shape, colour and line and how they relate to each other. “My work isn’t complicated and it’s not heavy work,” he says. “There’s no message in it.”
Wood, 73, drifted into abstraction after many years of representational painting. He’s been using encaustic for about a decade, mixing pigments into melted wax, then quickly brushing it on before it cools and hardens.
If you visit his Winnipeg studio, you'll see the pots and pans he uses to melt the wax. Wood was drawn encaustic because of the way it holds light – pigments never dissolve into the wax but are suspended within it. “The light seems to come from inside the painting,” he says.
Keith Wood, "Non-Fiction 11," 2017
encaustic on paper, 22" x 30”
Wood was born in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley. He had allergies and asthma as a child and started drawing with crayons on the bits of old parchment paper his mother gave him after she had baked something. “She used to call me her little artist,” he says.
He went on to attend the Nova Scotia College of Art in Halifax in the early ’60s. He kept making art throughout his life, although he held various jobs over the years, working in factories and driving cab, to support his family.
It’s only over the last 20 years or so that he says he has managed to make a modest living. Art, he jokes, is not a get-rich-quick scheme.
But Wood says he’s happy and healthy. He swims every day and does lots of walking. And, of course, he works in his studio, where he says he spends more time looking at his work than actually painting.
