Wood Against The Grain

  Holly Wood is topsy turvy. Holly Wood doesn't just let things be. When Holly Wood invites you into one of her paintings, you're getting a ride. Holly Wood opens doors. Her master key being the special goggles that allow her to see the Emperor's new clothes; she is adept at breaking through icons and mythologies to reveal what lies beyond.

            In Wood's world, the monolithic symbols of modern life are revealed as the same simple fears and pleasures that have ruled existence since light was let be. Wood has assembled a pantheon of archetypes, where Abraham Lincoln stands adjacent to housewives, to gods and monsters and stray dogs, and revealed each to be only us. With a style ranging from a painterly and disturbed cartoonism to graphic image embalming, Wood finds the normal, even the goofy, that grows in the cracks of the supernatural. A family of chupacabras enjoy a day at the beach; will they later be sucking the blood of farm animals? Who knows and who cares? For now we can see that each monstrous act comes from a complex place, that evil is somehow tied to love, and that villains are frequently misunderstood and often arbitrary.

            We are able to recognize in Wood's paintings a bit of the hero, the burn-out, the pious prude, the whore and the cop in each of us and therefore able to experience a kind of comical, but relevant, sense of ourselves as the present-moment expression of thousands of years of desperation and madness mixing with celebration and beauty. Few artists so capably display the anxious pleasure, the just off-centered, oddly saturated question that is real, day to day, life.

Stepping into Wood's work from the outside is made easy because of the lack of pretension; too many artists force their interpretations of life beyond the accessible. By contrast, Wood is engaged in an easy exploration of populist consciousness, somehow laying our humanity bare and turning our embarrassments to strange triumph. Wood has no use for the convoluted antics of academic art, she lives in the same world that you and I do and she stirs her brew from the same cauldron that you and I see and read and dream. "Art," each of her paintings is willing to proclaim, "¡Que Ruido!"

Zane Fischer
Santa Fe, NM
July 2003