Painter/Mosaicist
My workspace extends beyond the four walls of my studio. Fine days will find me in the garden or the surrounding fields soaking up the Pembrokeshire landscape and trying to capture something of it on a canvas.
It is only in front of my subject that I feel the need to paint and I respond to the artistic possibilities it offers. Who could resist sitting in the sun arranging colours and shapes in a pleasing way whilst listening to the pigeons cooing? Then reality sets in along with the bugs or the rain or the nosy sheep and the real challenge starts. How on earth to realise the intensity of the green field? How to catch a moment of the clouds scudding across the sky? How to capture the light, the place, the mood with man-made oil paints? Oil painting is hard work but when it goes well there is nothing like it.
I paint my watercolours indoors. They are far more contemplative and demand a sort of patience that I have to work at. I love the serendipitous effects of the colours running into each other beautifully… sometimes…. but keeping control of it and reaching a harmonious conclusion is a rare pleasure.
Mosaic offers a very different experience. Forward planning and a pleasant studio. Since I work from my oil paintings some of the creative decisions have already been made, I enjoy the process of cutting and glueing the brightly coloured glass tiles, the jigsaw absorption of it. I try to supplement the very limited available colour range with the use of shapes and rhythm and love the monumentality of the finished pieces.
"The paintings in this show are the result of a year working in a new landscape on the eastern edge of the Preselis, in the fertile valley of the Black Cleddau river. This time the landscape is viewed from her own garden, the trees, fences, stone walls and hedges of which provide the compositional elements of the painting, an armature on which to hang her characteristic absorption in colour relationships. The challenge is always to look and record, to make her mark on the canvas and then look again, chasing the fugitive colours as they approach, coalesce and disperse, moving away with the cloud shadows over the fields.
These paintings represent almost every month of the year and depict the garden in all its changing forms – the flaming oranges and golds of ash and beech in autumn, the subdued tones of the sleeping midwinter hedge-bank and rockery, the startling, emerald explosion of spring. This diary of the seasons is a personal vision, specific to a few moments when, in the ever-changing light, form and colour find their equivalence in oil or gouache.”
- J.P. English. From the introduction to “The Last Picture Show” Paintworks Gallery, London 2016
Website: https://www.dorothywoodart.com/
The postcode has been used to identify the location of the property, so please only use this map as a guide.
What3Words ///: bowhead.overlaps.evenings
From Crymych. Drive south on A478 and take the first right turn signposted Mynachlogddu. After about 3 miles, just before reaching Mynachlogddu there are 3 houses together on the left. Mine is the little white one on the end.
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Studio & Garden Open 10am - 5pm
Studio isn’t open to the public outside of this event except by appointment
