Clare Woods

Sunken Line
2015
Oil on aluminium
150 x 100 cm
Gifted by a Trustee of The Hepworth Wakefield, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery

Woods’ 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.