years, everything is much more intentional. I collage to bend space in a certain way. GD: Are there technological drivers that have enabled your distinctive style? JW: I wouldn’t say any current technologies, but I am very interested in printmaking. It is a new language for me. I don’t do digital. I like to cut it out, move it around, and glue it down. GD: You’re analog. JW: Yes, definitely. It’s not like I couldn’t do it on my computer; it’s not that, but I like the manual process. I’ve been printmaking for eight years now. When I discovered it, I was like, “Wow, this totally relates to how I paint.” When you make a silkscreen, for instance, you have to work from the back to the front of the image. If you look at my paintings after 2013, there’s so much that I’ve learned from making etchings also. A certain mark-making and line quality that wasn’t there before. You can see it in the large TWO x TWO painting. GD: The “Pink Plant Patio Landscape Pot”? JW: Yeah, the whole pot, the way it’s painted. It is a combination of what I was doing before I started printmaking, which was a lot of flat planes on top of each other with some line work and some mark-making—I am more conscious of those marks now. So printmaking as a technology has been really important to me. GD: You’re mining a technique in the same way you are excavating your personal archive, a strateg y for dealing with the past and the present simultaneously. JW: Yes, I guess. GD: Final question. I always felt your work applied a certain pressure to a “conventional” distinction between abstraction and representation. Could you talk about that? JW: Well, I definitely have bodies of work where I want the experience of viewing to approach abstract painting. I’m thinking about the tennis court paintings or basketball paintings. A dominant color, some lines, and an emblem or logo. It does relate to what I mentioned earlier, you know, identifying something that is interesting for me to paint. With the tennis court there was like, “Oh, this is something I can keep going back to.” It’s very meditative and compositionally minimal. I think of myself as a figurative painter, but I come to it from an abstract painter’s sensibility. I’m just trying to figure out the right balance that works for me.
§ Wood is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Broad, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. His work is currently part of a two-person show, Shio Kusaka and Jonas Wood, at Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, The Netherlands. P
Above, right: Jonas Wood, Birds Card, 2005, colored pencil and crayon on paper, 30 x 22 in. Photograph by Thomas Müller. Courtesy of the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York, New York. Below, right: Jonas Wood, Wimbledon L, 2013, oil and acrylic on linen, 88 x 60 in. Photograph by Brian Forrest. Courtesy of the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York, New York.
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