Wood’s Whimsical ‘Plants’

The Armand Hammer Museum has been on a roll in recent months, with shows by Charles Burchfield and Robert Crumb. Add to this eclectic, electric list the young abstract artist Jonas Wood, whose whimsical series of paintings based on plants are a must-see. ‘I’m only relying on structure: plant and base,’ Wood tells the Palisadian-Post on a recent visit to his Culver City home base. And that’s about it. The minimalist painter jettisons three-dimensional planes and perspective from his latest group of canvases. Alive with simple shapes and basic colors which all at once evoke Joan Mir’, Alexander Calder and perhaps some wonderfully dated-looking art from a Little Golden children’s book or the cover of a funky 1960s jazz album, Wood’s paintings are now on display through May 9 at the Hammer, located at Wilshire and Westwood Boulevards. In addition to various group shows, Wood’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in New York, Chicago and Tokyo. Wood’s Culver City studio is located at the end of a busy alley in an industrial area lined with hangars of auto parts and furniture imports. A small black dog named Robot greets the Post reporter on a recent visit. In one corner of the room, Wood’s assistant will spend the entire time focused on his laptop, as if posing for a still life. As solid as the work is, Wood’s Hammer exhibit may be a disservice to him as an artist, as it represents only one facet of what he does. Here at his studio, there’s a much wider breadth on display, and the artist, casual in a royal blue track suit jacket, is surrounded by oversized works in various stages of completion: abstracted portraits based on family photos and baseball cards, interiors, a Spalding basketball. But at the Hammer, viewers will see his series of potted plants, distilled to their very essence: leaves, stem, base. All of these oil-on-linen works are untitled. Wood is not particularly excited about titling his individual paintings. But he does have a label for the group of nine abstracts already there hanging at the Hammer. ‘The name of the show is ‘New Plants,” Woods says. ‘I want you to know that these are plants.’ Or ‘very simplified plant forms,’ as he dubs them. Wood did not consciously set out to emulate or evoke Calder, an artist he enjoys, but he relates to and connects with Calder’s ‘primal struggle’ between dimensions. On one table sits a miniature model of the gallery space at the Hammer which Wood created to see how the paintings would be organized. Next to this cardboard construction, which features thumbnail versions of the paintings on display, are under-drawings for paintings of the model itself. Instead of painting existing interiors, as he has often done, ‘I’m doing the reverse,’ he says, ‘creating hypothetical interiors.’ Wood, who turns 33 this year, was born in Boston and raised in the suburb Weston. He received a B.A. in psychology from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in upstate New York, and his M.F.A. from the University of Washington in 2002. Upon graduation, he knew he didn’t want to return to the East Coast, so he moved to Los Angeles in 2003 at the urging of a buddy, sculptor Matt Johnson. Unlike, say, San Francisco, L.A. has an important art scene, Wood says. Unlike New York, L.A. has good weather going for it. The artist does see some California influence in some work, ‘particularly the cactus and succulents out here.’ To him, the palm trees are exotic, ‘prehistoric.’ One painting features a bird of paradise atop a Sony stereo speaker, which is broken down into geometric shapes and cool, muted colors. Interiors of his parents’ and grandparents’ homes are a kind of ground zero from which many of his abstract images emerged, to be re-contextualized. One of the paintings in the Hammer show, a predominantly yellow canvas with wan doodles earmarked by a red triangle wedge, is based on his painting of a children’s drawing made by his older sister, pinned to the wall of his childhood home and appeared in the background of another painting. From a portrait of his mother with a cat seated in front of a group of plants, Wood created a series reinterpreting those plants as seen in the painting, not the source photos. ‘I’ve been painting the art in the back of my paintings,’ Wood says. ‘There are all sorts of abstractions, all these little moments’ which he likes to re-contextualize as new works of art. ‘But it’s still from me. I don’t feel as detached.’ He points to the vague reds and yellows behind Oil Can Boyd on a baseball card pinned to the wall. ‘I could say everything about those things,’ he says, regarding those blurry shapes. On one wall, his portrait of Pablo Picasso hangs among his interpretations of baseball heroes. ‘All of the Boston sports teams are my teams,’ he says, showing his rendition of former Celtic Larry Bird. Wood walks the Post through some of his process. Take a particularly lively portrait of Wood’s wife, ceramist Shio Kusaka (who is now about seven months pregnant with their first child), and Robot, amid striped furniture and a gaudy chandelier. In the painting”in which Wood exploits patterns in Kusaka’s dress, the furniture, and in the repetition created by the chandelier’s candleholders”art imitates life as Robot is depicted doing exactly what he does during the Post’s visit: slumbering in a black, long-haired lump.   Wood suggests that a common technique cuts across all of his paintings, regardless of subject matter. ‘There’s a flatness in my work,’ he says. That is Wood’s legerdemain, making such minimalism look effortless and fresh. Wood believes that ‘only in the last three or four years have I been making work that’s important [in terms of his artistic evolution].’ So does Wood worry that ‘New Plants’ might erroneously suggest an artist with a narrow type of output? ‘I have a fear of being pigeonholed,’ he says, quickly adding that he does not fret about these images representing his first major West Coast show. ‘History compresses an artist’s work to make people think they’re doing only a certain kind of work,’ Wood says. ‘I’m not going to be concerned if people are [upset] if I never do anything like this again.’