Jonas Wood on ‘Plants and Animals,’ his first LA show in four years – WWD

In his first exhibition in Los Angeles in four years, Jonas Wood presents “Plants and Animals”, on view until March 5 at the David Kordansky Gallery.

Originally from Boston, Jonas moved to Los Angeles in 2003 and has since become a big name in the art world. Prolific, displaying his work all over the world, the 44-year-old has stayed home amid the pandemic, with the artist and his wife Shio Kusaka and their two young children. Naturally, there was a change in her routine. But the work never stopped.

With his new show, Jonas explores recurring themes – paintings and drawings – framed in interiors and exteriors of varying scales, inserting family members, the natural world and elements of pop culture, as well as his love of sport. . It’s the longest he’s ever worked on a gallery show, he said. “It’s the accumulation of the work I’ve been working on for three years.”

Here the artist gives an insight into the making of “Plantes and Animals”. It all started with “Three Dogs” and “Deer and Picasso,” two works created in 2019 that he clung to, he explained.

WWD: What made you keep these two pieces?

Jonas Wood: I thought they needed to be shown in the right context, in Dave’s amazing gallery, and have a longer interaction with her. There are two options, it seems, in the art world – I guess three – [you] show something at an art fair, show something on a PDF, or show something in a gallery, or at least for me. Seems like those are my three options right now. And then with the gallery, there’s a whole opportunity to have a time for people to see it a little longer. And also, just the scene of a bunch of paintings together in space. And I think that’s really important… I wanted to be able to show them together, put their powers together and show them at the same time.

WWD: When you think about all the work on the show, what aligns them?

J.W.: Working on these current paintings, and I always guess, I just have enough kinds of things that I want to work on a painting, and it seems like when I get to the end of that list of things, I end up look at it isolated and see if I just notice anything that’s not well balanced. And then I hang around with it and if it doesn’t seem to bother me too much, I don’t paint on it anymore. But what connects all these works? I was thinking a lot about branding and line and color and how those things can all collide and create an image.

WWD: I read that you call your work a visual diary. Is it correct to say?

JW: I think it’s a visual diary, like an open view on certain pages of a diary. But I think, maybe, at least I want it to be something really important to me, like I live there. Is it a personal diary? You’d assume a diary would be full of truths, and I think a lot of my work actually happened in my life – and a lot of the other half didn’t. It’s just based on creating images and the images that I like, and how I see the painting ideas in the images that I’m looking for and want to try to paint them in my own way, knowing how I want to approach their construction. Just like almost like an abstraction, like big shapes to small shapes and lines. I can build anything. In a way, my diary is full of everything, but the things I choose from this diary are those that I think are close to me personally or just close to me in the sense of painting. And it’s a challenge, and I want you to believe that it’s somewhere that I was or am or is, but you don’t really need to know if it’s my wife or my dogs or not my dogs and not my wife. It’s my son ? Or do I know the person doing the painting in the Hawaii painting? I know some of these people, and I don’t know some of these people. And I don’t really need you to know the difference, at least when you look at them without any knowledge of my work. I think of the painting as if the person approaching it knew nothing. They haven’t read a press release. They don’t know who you are. And that’s okay. They should always be able to know something about my story, even if that story is fictional or non-fictional.

WWD: It’s nice as a spectator to be able to see a piece without any previous knowledge and to form your own opinion. But then there’s a fascination and you want to dive in and learn more about an artist’s work, their process. After the fact, do you like or care to make these distinctions between what you consider to be the truth and what is not?

JW: Of course, verbally or in writing, if we talked about it. Or if you see it in the title, it is sometimes given away. But in this case, as if I told you, the painting called “Future Zoo” with the gharial reptiles of the Indian river floating in it, these are just two photos that I found of the zoo that I liked the way they looked , and I put them together like two photos. I love that they all have their own story about how they are made. These are not lies. You can find out if this concerns me or not by asking more questions. But I think it is poignant to paint my child or to paint my mother or to paint my wife or to paint my family or to paint a space in which I have lived. The depths can certainly draw me in, more emotionally, and then potentially, perhaps projecting out into the universe with its energies towards the viewer. Or not. I want there to be a distinction sometimes. But in the idea of ​​painting, I would like a still life to be as powerful as a portrait. But sometimes things probably transcend those things. And that’s OK too. Painting is elusive, and you hope to try to paint a masterpiece every time, but you know you really can’t paint the one with the most emotion or the one with all the truth. You know? But maybe sometimes you hit it.

WWD: Have you always been an image collector? How long do you remember collecting?

JW: When I started painting and I kind of knew that I was not a life painter, like an plein air painter. Even though I’m obviously a figurative painter and I paint life, parts of life that we all know, it’s not photorealistic. I can draw and paint from life if I want to, and I learned to do that, and kind of forced myself to do that when I was in school. I was taught that in graduate school, figure painting is something where you look at something in real life and paint it. But it turned out, “Oh, I’m looking at pictures.” I use a photograph as a source, but also something that I look at. I collect photos. People send them to me. I find things that I see with my own eyes. And I have stacks and stacks of images, thousands and hundreds of thousands of images inside digital devices. And then I research what I want to paint. I have too many painting ideas, so it doesn’t seem that difficult… I have rooms in my studio where there are tons of photos pinned to the walls, and I have stacks of photos that I go through .

WWD: What makes you want to come back to certain images and patterns? Is it instinctive? Don’t you doubt it?

JW: Well, I’m probably asking myself too many questions. I certainly paint in a lot of different typefaces, and then there are these other more important things that I keep coming back to. The still life does not change much. It’s still a still life. I guess I use a lot of similar character types, and the characters are like growing the pots and the plants, and how I set them all up. It’s a certain kind of painting challenge. But there are also portraits or interiors or landscapes or exteriors, or paintings of objects. I think it’s just a way to practice painting and all these different types of painting that I like to do. And then, I hope they continue to evolve, and in a difficult way for me. Also, I do a lot more than what I just showed. Lots of smaller works and medium-sized works on paper and paintings… There’s a much bigger universe.

WWD: We get a glimpse of this universe by seeing both a painting and its drawing exhibited. What was the process of creating “BBall Studio”? It seems, in one, to capture many different elements of your work.

JW: It’s my workshop. It’s real life. I took a picture in my studio. It was a real photo… I didn’t really manipulate much. A lot of the pots were empty, and I added plants that I had made from an exhibit in Hong Kong with all these different cuts, and kind of put them in there. I’ve painted my studio several times before, so it’s not really a new idea. But it’s a new studio. It’s a different studio. And it’s a whole new vibe. And this is also the idea of ​​surrealism. Is it real or is it not real? Is this the reality? It’s real life. The zoo thing is not my life, but it’s an idea I wanted to paint. I love that part about how I can tell a story, that you wouldn’t know if it’s real or not until you did. But it should give the impression that it is possible.

WWD: I could stare at this painting forever. It’s so fascinating to me.

JW: I kept this one for myself.

WWD: Why this particular one?

JW: I always keep a painting or two from each exhibition. I really wanted to keep this sofa painting pattern [“Patterned Interior with Mar Vista View”]. I lived with this painting for two years, and it was a truly joyful experience to live with in my studio. And then I finished “BBall Studio”, that and “Future Zoo” are the last two paintings I finished before I finished the show. I was thinking of keeping this giant painting [“BBall Studio”], and I was like, “Wow, I can’t believe I really want to keep this.” And maybe that’s the one I should keep, especially because the sofa painting is in it, unfinished on the bottom, and so I can kind of keep both… It’s like a good self-portrait and a time capsule of my life as a painter.