“Isn’t it luscious?” Mary Wood enthuses as she swooshes and swirls thick gobs of acrylic paint onto a huge four-foot by four-foot white canvas with rubber-gloved hands. The prolific Essa artist began the new painting to demonstrate the technique she’s using for her latest series of work, called Glasgow. The series was spawned by photos she took while visiting Scotland’s largest city. It wasn’t her first trip there, so Wood, 71, was amazed she says at how much prettier and cleaner the city was this time around.

“And then I started looking around, and I thought, well, not so much,” she muses. As someone who tends to hone in on the smallest details when looking for inspiration for a painting (her last series, Unlocked, for example, was triggered by the way her keys landed when they fell onto a table), what Wood noticed in Glasgow and what inspired her new series, may not have gone unnoticed by a typical tourist, but would have most definitely gone unphotographed. “I’m fascinated by what people leave behind and what it says about us as a species,” Wood explains of her collection of photos she took around a Glasgow café. There are pictures of cigarette stubs on a concrete sidewalk, bits of strewn garbage and yes, even a urine-soaked corner of a brick wall.

“People either thought I was totally crazy or an inspector,” she laughs. (Her geographer husband, incidentally, tends to take off on his own explorations of the countryside while she snaps her decidedly questionable tourist photos.) While one’s initial reaction to the photo collection is repulsion it doesn’t take long to understand what the artist’s eye is seeing: namely, shadow, light and texture.

Wood manipulates her photos on computer with Adobe Photoshop into black and white images to pick up the best contrast. From there, she chooses either the whole photo, or a portion of it, as a guide for her creation on canvas. She works only in deep blue, yellow oxide and red oxide mixed with white, a limit she imposed on herself three years ago after she found her love of colour and sheen left her struggling to complete a piece of work. The end results are a fascinating collection of abstracts, rich in their tone and texture, the cigarettes and urine having contributed by way of unrecognizable, yet interesting, objects or shadings.

She took the same type of photos on a trip to Lisbon, Portugal last year. “I photographed garbage and graffiti. Just stuff ,” she says, which prompted her daughter to describe these particular series as ‘finding the extraordinary in the ordinary.’

Wood paints with gusto. Within minutes, the blue disposable rubber gloves are coated with colour, as are the glass paint bottles that contain her colour mixes and her stiff , old apron (which proclaims, through paint smears, “If You’re Pushing 50 That’s Exercise Enough.”). The decision to paint with her hands this time around was borne from her desire to let loose after completing the Unlocked series, which required the use of brushes and a very steady hand to paint very purposeful lines that separate bold, bright colours from each other.

Staying Outside the Box

Wood is not an artist that can be slotted into a distinct style of painting. Each of her series stands as proof of that. For Unlocked, a bold, bright collection, Wood explains she combined the strong design sense of aboriginal art with the graphic simplicity of pop art.

Five years ago, her Prairie Mirage and Memory series, from which a solo show emerged at The Double Doors Studio and Gallery west of Alliston, focused on the wide-open spaces she was so familiar with as a child growing up in Canada’s west. “They (people in the art world) say you shouldn’t keep changing your style,” Wood remarks. She disagrees. “I believe that women are lateral thinkers. They’re much more open to experimentation, to stepping out of their comfort area, perhaps more than men.”

That being said, Wood believes it’s important to stick to one body of work until you’ve pushed it as far as it can go. “When it’s taught you as much as it can, you can move on to something else,” she explains. “But you really have to commit to that learning process.”

Her Prairie series, for example, became not only a study in painting wide-open spaces (something she loves to do) but “an exorcism of old memories.” The emotionally-charged show, which laces remembered conversations between her mother and father, hand-written on brown paper strips in between hanging canvases, documented among other memories, the heartbreaking decision to sell the family farm when wheat prices dropped too low to sustain a living. “Gabe, whatever you do, don’t sell my mirror,” was one thing Wood remembers her mother, Mel, saying to her father. Another, “When he came home across the field he’d always pick Prairie lilies,” spoke of her parents’ devotion to one another.

Some canvases from the Prairie show are still tucked in her studio and Wood has a story for each one. One piece, layered with deep, charcoal swaths highlighted with scant smoky streaks of crimson, depicts the urgency felt during an escape from a Prairie wildfire. Other paintings, like the big, golden canvas with just the outline of a white square box in the middle,were sparked by Wood’s own keen sense of humour. Titled “Middle of Nowhere” it symbolizes the time she recalls getting lost while driving in Saskatchewan.

Prairie Girl

Wood was born in Saskatchewan. She grew up on a farm with her younger siblings, strong-willed mother, Mel, and storytelling father, Gabe. When the farm fell on hard times, Gabe sold it and moved his family to Alberta, where he supported them on his welder’s wages from working the oil fields. A self-described “internal kid”, Wood’s artistic abilities showed themselves early. At the age of 12 she began working with oils and pastels, often staying after school while her teacher marked papers and casually offered suggestions now and then. “Buying oil paints wasn’t easy for my parents - we were poor - but they did it,” she says.

Wood credits her mother for all her artistic ability and has been known to describe her as “a mad woman” since she was pretty much the only oil field worker’s wife who would “drive through anything” to deliver a hearty meal to her husband. “Call Mrs. Gabe” was what the ‘tool pushers’ would say when hunger struck.

Midlife Horse Crisis

Wood no doubt inherited both the storytelling gene from her father, but some of that “mad woman” spunk from her mother too. It was just last August, at the age of 70, that she decided to hang up the reins from her carriage driving adventures, after her stubborn determination to break the stubbornness of one of her horses resulted in a nasty spill and a useless left arm for eight months. This past spring she was just starting to get back into the studio, having regained enough strength to lift her canvases again.

Her venture into horseback riding is a story in itself. Wood didn’t even start the sport until she was in her 40s, after her children moved out of the family farm in Essa. “I was afraid of horses,” she says frankly. Finding herself in a bit of a conundrum with a barn full of horses and no children at home left to ride them, Wood was left contemplating what to do.

Learning how to ride, was naturally the answer. She not only fell in love with riding, she started to compete in dressage events. A bad accident in 1991, however, instilled in her a panic that she couldn’t shake. But, instead of stopping the sport altogether, she simply switched riding styles. “I tried carriage driving, which is even more dangerous,” she laughs. Wood and her pony went on to become North American reserve champions in the sport. However, her panic from her previous accident reared its ugly head once again, leading to her decision to sell her pony and just focus on teaching art.

“Then one night, after a few too many glasses of wine, a friend of mine called to tell me about a Pinto that was for sale on the Internet.” Wood bought the pony on the spot, musing how she realized too late that her purchase lived in North Dakota and she’d have to make her own transportation arrangements. It was the ornery buddy she bought for this Pinto that took her for a tumble last summer and prompted her to tie up the reins once and for all.

Onward

Now, with the last of her horses sold off , Wood is as focused as ever on new adventures, keeping her artist’s eye open to fresh ideas and concepts. If she’s not travelling the world, you’ll find her teaching at various local venues like the Blue Heron Studio north of Alliston or at retreats around Ontario. “I tend to be a loner, but I don’t want to quit teaching until I’m forced to. I’ve met so many people. I’ve seen them expand and grow with their art. It’s so great as an instructor seeing people develop confidence in themselves,” she says.

Her experimental canvas she started at the beginning of the conversation is almost filled with the first layer of paint. There’s one particular section in the top right corner that she is very pleased with. “Oh, I like that,” she says as she works more red oxide into the mix. She takes a look at the photo from which the abstract was spawned. “I still have to figure out how to work in the cigarette stubs,” she ponders with hand on chin. When she does, there’s no doubt the result will be extraordinary.

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To see more of Mary Wood’s art visit her web site at www.marywoodstudio.com.