Brian Wood: Introduction to the Artist and the Work (continued)
...to retain that immediacy. They enact fleeting somatic sensation and memory. The paintings begin with the immediacy of a quickly realized drawing but then are developed toward more and more complexity over an extended period of time. Although that first emergence from unconscious to conscious is retained, other mental and physical processes are applied so that the image functions through many levels of awareness and thought. In Wood’s case, less is not more. Instead, complexity is generated from interacting processes of awareness and material and so many qualities and forms co-exist within an individual work.
The ink drawings on mylar and ink/photo hybrids also progress from simple form to complex structure. Response to accident on the surface, as the image is found, also plays a role. In the hybrid pieces, the ink painting is always made first and then a photograph, made by Wood, 
is remembered from his photographic archive and collaged over the painting. The photograph, originating in a single moment of space/time, breaches the cumulative time and space of the painting, thus creating an interaction and possibility for integration that exists in some third temporal category. Using multiple images in film, photographic constructions, and lithographic pieces, Wood utilizes multiplicity for developing and evolving complexity and interacting layers of meaning.
Influenced by Romanesque art in the central region of France where he worked for a decade, Wood appreciated their use of illusionism, geometric abstraction, narration, and decorative devices, all combined in symbolism that seems to originate in both eruptions from the unconscious and systems of philosophy and metaphysics. Painting, sculpture, and architecture are used together to create a very complex physical and spiritual experience. Likewise, while making a film in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan early in his career, he experienced Tantric Buddhist images, tankas, sculpture,and architecture that also combine many pictorial and spatial devices, not as ends in themselves, but as images and objects to be used for psychological and spiritual transformation. 
Raised on the prairie of northern Saskatchewan, Wood’s early imagination was formed in harsh land, severe weather, and the life and death cycles of animals, crops and wilderness. Wood’s childhood on the farm, his absorption in both nature and books, his later studies in mathematics and science, have joined with his deep interest in spiritual matters to form the issues and obsessions in his work.
Wood asks: what is and where is consciousness? Brain researchers can’t really locate it, religions mythologize and moralize it, drugs alter or intensify it, meditation observes it, culture and language tailor it. And what is body and where are its limits? In his response to constantly changing awareness,
Wood is particularly attentive to pre-linguistic experience – images arising in mind before language, memories from very early childhood, visions from near-death experiences, and images that cannot be contained or de-intensified by rational thought. First image, then structure, then ego and context: the world as an aggregate of images.
Brian Wood’s work locates and questions itself in the dualism of spirit-matter: biological substrata, structure through differentiation, transformation as mind, extension in multiplicity. Do mind and world co-create? Do subject/object distinctions have meaning? What is difference? Can dualism be transcended? Wood’s images map shifting consciousness displaying in time – instants of photographic time and location, accretions of matter in paint, non-linear time and space that expands, contracts, and evolves in multiple images. Wood’s images arise in their making and are grounded in his lived body and psyche – intertwined memory, perception, eroticism, visions, projection, and emotion.
