Duncan Wood NEAC

Statement

Duncan’s work is concerned with emulating an aspect, or aspects of the first-hand visible world of landscape, still life and the figure - at times merging these genre. Painting is for him, primarily, a personal homage to visual experience, to ‘The Existent’; an activity in which the task is to conjure and edit series of colours, marks and compositions that give as true a form as possible to his vision. 

Duncan hopes that viewers of his work will identify with its source, or come to perceive its source, or parts of its source from looking afresh at the world. He does not attempt to copy appearances exactly, because the world is in a constant state of flux and therefore impossible to pin down. Neither does he disregard the place for the conceptual, but would wish it to be subservient to and derive from the senses. 

He believes that the permutations available to painters that wish to work directly from nature, but in a new and vital way are inexhaustible. All this is not to say that a painter's sustenance is found purely from a direct collaboration with nature but also from an awareness of historical and contemporary art.

From: 'The Tables Turned’ (The Lyrical Ballads) 

‘One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,

Of moral evil and of good,

Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the law that nature brings;

Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things;

- We murder to dissect.’

William Wordsworth (1798)

Bio

1980-81   Gloucestershire College of Art and Design

1981-84   Sheffield Hallam University, BA (Hons) Fine Art

1996-97   The Institute of Education, University of London  (Since 2015 the UCL Institute of Education)

2001-03   The City and Guilds of London Art School, MA FineArt - Painting

2008-14   Faculty Member and Senior Tutor, The Prince’s Drawing School, London

(Since November 2014  The Royal Drawing School)   

2011  -     Associate Lecturer, Fine Art, The Sheffield Institute of Arts, Sheffield Hallam University