Qianqian Li Design: Collage Illustrator-Eleanor Wood

Born in 1955 and brought up in London, Eleanor studied at Hornsey School of Art, Winchester and Chelsea College of Art (MA in Painting). For many years she was based in Norfolk, but now divides her time between studios in the USA and the UK.

“Eleanor Wood. has skirted the periphery of Minimalism for her entire career, fine-tuning her obsessive, hypersensitive and exquisite miniature technique. In 2002 she moved from her native England to California, the displacement serving as catalyst for a body of work that demonstrates a departure from her previous practice, and which is distinct from Minimalist orthodoxy.

The assertive color saturations are new to Wood’s previously monochrome repertoire. They are achieved through painting washes of watercolor onto the reverse side of absorbent paper. Waxed Japanese paper is then glued over the front surface as a barrier on top of which intricate layers of oil pastel are applied. The effect is one of finely calibrated pulsations of light and matter that mirror, on a microcosmic level, the tension between embedment in, and flotation above, the paper support of the central colored rectangles.

“Exploring the borders between illusion and reality, the works in the show move from a dry grid of tiny lines on a warm, gray-brown background to an evocative composition of ghostly rectangular shapes interrupted by a lush, painterly field of sanguine pigment. Wood’s works manage to be both austere and beautiful, fragile yet powerful, and one hopes to see more of them.”