Thomas Wood

Included in numerous institutional and private collections nationwide, Thomas Wood (1951-2022) was an award-winning intaglio printmaker and established painter whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.

Wood’s diverse prints from 40 years of printmaking range from oneiric fantasies to naturalistic views and employ such varied techniques as etching, drypoint, mezzotint, Chine-collé and engraving. Wood’s imagery plays with the workings of the imagination, materializing as surreal worlds, allegorical compositions and lush landscape scenes. The artist combined the technical virtuosity of old world printmaking with his uniquely subjective viewpoint, nimbly shifting from meditative to symbolist, from naturalist to surrealist, and from the aesthetic to the ironic.

Wood’s oil paintings often center on the sublime aspects of the Northwest wilderness. Moody, lush, and mysterious, this work tends toward the surreal and fantastic. Preferring the rhythm and movement of a place, the essence of the experience, to a strict copying of nature, Wood sought out the “elemental feeling” of pristine Northwest locales. His paintings manifest a range of solidified styles—encompassing the visionary, the Romantic, and the abstract. The artist refused to see landscape painting as a comfortable activity. He embraced scenarios that challenged him to work quickly and intuitively— capturing rapidly changing weather, or painting outdoors at night, in the cold, and in the rain while his easel slowly filled with water—all of which allowed the painter to become part of the landscape he sensed around him.

A native of Richland, Washington, graduate of Fairhaven College of Western Washington University and Cornish alumnus, Wood absorbed regional influences from First Nation tribes of Washington early in his career, sojourning in the Queen Charlotte Islands (now Gulf Islands) in 1978 and 1979. Another key experience was apprenticing to a master printer in Florence, Italy in 1980. In the Netherlands in 1993, he studied oil painting on his own by examining works in Dutch museums.

Wood, who has been represented by Lisa Harris Gallery, now Harris Harvey Gallery, since 1987 was honored with retrospectives of his prints at the Whatcom Museum of History and Art, Bellingham, and Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner in 1998 and 1999 respectively. The internationally respected atelier, Il Bisonte, in Florence, where he has taught, has mounted exhibitions of Wood’s work. In 2012 an exhibition featuring the work also toured Venice and Milan. A significant upcoming exhibition, “Under the Inspiration Tree, Celebrating the Work of Thomas Wood,” will be on display September 28, 2024 - March 2, 2025 at the Whatcom Museum, Bellingham, Washington. Wood’s works are included in countless collections of private individuals and in institutions such as the Tacoma Art Museum, Microsoft, the University of Washington Medical Center, Whatcom Museum of Art and History, and Museum of Northwest Art to name a few.