Greg Wood: Re Wilding the West

Greg Wood is a painter of the earthy and ethereal. The observation of atmospheric and environmental shifts in Wood’s surrounding landscape have been central to his practice for the past 25 years. Attracted to observing the dynamic and subtle states of transformation exerted by changing conditions, weather and light, Wood is equally attuned to the marks of human impact on the natural world. Key to Wood’s artistic development was his formal training in Tasmania—a landscape which left an indelible imprint on his aesthetic and continues to inform his practice.

During a recent residency in Queenstown, a former mining town on the West coast of Tasmania, Wood observed and created a series of works that he describes as ‘resurrection landscapes,’ or images of places previously altered by human activity and now in the process of regeneration. He describes these landscapes as occupying a liminal space between the abstraction and realism of his own style. These works visualize the physical abstraction wrought by human intervention and the shifting forces of the environment's atmosphere versus the capacity of nature to heal and remodel itself. To Wood, the act of painting these wounded landscapes is a practice of restitution and contrition.

Wood currently resides in one such landscape—the Central Victorian Goldfields, on Dja Dja Wurrung country. Described by the local indigenous community as ‘Upside Down Country,’ after the Gold Rush’s ecological disruptions, this deeply disfigured landscape, marred and churned from mining, is in the process of reconfiguration. The singular landscape, with its saturated copper hues and shadowy crenulations inspire Wood to create artwork that holds the unsettled beauty of a place both devastated and re-emerging. His art acknowledges the environmental disruptions of human impact, but simultaneously bears witness to the immense power of nature’s capacity to adapt and repair itself.

For Wood, a location’s specifics are far less important than the emotional and figural impressions of a place that endure. He paints places traversed through sensory experiences, inviting the viewer to enter an embodied sense of place, evoking memory and emotion – landscapes of the familiar and not. Wood describes his work as a ‘slow release,’ where the nuances of his paintings gradually reveal themselves to the viewer. Melbourne tonalist Clarice Beckett’s work, in particular, has been a formative influence for him, as revealed in Wood’s translucent, gestural layers of muted colour, flattened forms, merging tones, and diffused light.

Wood’s paintings are psychologically and visually alluring. The more we look, the more we are invited to come into communion with how place shapes us, how we can dwell in landscapes both literal and interior.