Mid-Century Artist/Mid-Century Modern Art

J. M. Wood's Artistic Style

Josef Albers and his color theory was a major influence on Wood while he was a student at Yale University, but there were many artistic currents running through the Yale University School of Art during Wood’s time there.  Albers was instrumental in bringing the Bauhaus approach to art and design to the United States, first under his leadership at Black Mountain College (from 1933 to 1949) and then at Yale from 1950 to 1958.  Wood was clearly influenced by Albers and his approach to “color theory” (published as Interaction of Color, 1963).  Wood described color as relational and described himself as a “colorist."  But New Haven was also close to New York City, the epicenter of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, and Wood later recalled that he and his student peers made frequent trips to “The City” to see exhibitions.  James Books, an established Ab-X painter in the NYC art scene, taught at Yale while Wood was a student there, and Brooks’ more painterly approach to composition are a clear influence throughout Wood’s career.  Neil Welliver, who was first a student in the Yale MFA Program and later an instructor there before taking a position at the University of Pennsylvania, had perhaps the greatest impact on the development of Wood’s mature style including his focus on landscape and use of color.

After earning his MFA, and while teaching in the Studio Art Program at Williams College, Wood painted a series of oil on canvas still-life and semi-portrait images set in his cramped studio space in the campus bell tower he called the "Studio Series."  The oil on canvas paintings in this series meld a more representational style that Wood would come back to throughout his career, while also clearly exhibiting the influence of Brooks’ fluid approach to shape and composition. However, it was a pencil-on-paper study of a double-sash window with tree forms appearing through the glass panes that Wood drew from the living room of a Williams College-owned farmhouse where he lived with his young family that was to have the most lasting impact on the trajectory of his approach to the use of color.  That study informed the “Reflections, Two Trees” series of five paintings, one of which (“Reflections, Two Trees #3) he reworked as he prepared to begin working on the “Windows” series of paintings that would be the focus of his creative work for the next 22 years.

Wood left Williams College for a tenure-track position at Northern Illinois University in 1968 and immediately began work on the first of the “Windows Series” of paintings.  In all Wood created 30 oil-on-canvas paintings for the series between 1968 and 1990.  As his mentor Joseph Albers did with his well-known “Homage to the Square” series of dozens of paintings, drawings, and prints, Wood used the series to experiment with form, color, and composition.  Stylistically, the paintings in the series move between a Brooks-like Ab-X influenced representational approach to experiments with Color Field and Hard-edge compositions for which Albers’ students are widely known.  Between 1976 and 1989 Wood also completed 14 paintings in two series called “Window Images” and “Skylight” that are less representational and which drop the framing and double-sash window pane compositional approach of the “Windows” paintings for a more abstract, looser configuration of pane-like shapes.

In 1990, while on sabbatical in the Santa Fe, New Mexico area, Wood completed a series of pastel landscape studies for his last series of paintings called “Animal Spirits.”  Wood described the series as “breaking through” the window/skylight to move out into the landscape.  It is here, in Wood’s Southwestern US landscape paintings that Welliver’s influence is most clearly evidenced and where Wood returned to a more painterly Ab-X infused approach to the relational use of color to create form and space. Upon his retirement from NIU in 1996, Wood (who is a descendent of Meriwether Lewis) drove the Lewis and Clark Trail with his wife, completing a series of pencil and paper landscape studies along the trail.  Most of the drawings were sold by Wood but 3 were donated to the Lewis & Clark Exploratory Center. The only painting based on a drawing in the series ("Lolo Pass) is held in a private collection.