Clare Woods

Clare Woods (b.1972, Southampton, UK) trained at Bath College of Art and Goldsmith’s College in London. Her paintings are often discussed in relation to the work of British landscape painters of the 1930s and 40s, in particular Graham Sutherland and John Piper. Using photographs as her starting point, Woods builds layers of paint on aluminium.

The reflective surface and ambiguous pictorial details – rock formations, natural pools, twisted vegetation – create dark, brooding and claustrophobic images. Wood’s exhibition The Unquiet Head at The Hepworth Wakefield in 2011 presented a group of new large-scale paintings made in response to the landscape at Brimham Rocks, Yorkshire, which also influenced Hepworth.