Thomas Wood - Northwest Painter and Intaglio Printmaker, 1951 - 2022

In Memoriam

It is with heavy hearts that we share that long-time gallery artist Thomas Wood passed away, at the age of 70, on January 5, 2022. We will deeply miss his benevolent spirit, charming sense of humor and creative vision. Wood's final solo exhibition at Harris Harvey Gallery, “Northwest Landscape Paintings and Early Prints,” was held from December 2018 to January 2019. The gallery began presenting his work in 1988 with his first solo exhibition held in 1991.

Thomas Wood (1951-2022) was an established painter and award-winning printmaker who exhibited nationally and internationally. Wood’s diverse prints from nearly 50 years of printmaking range from oneiric fantasies to naturalistic views and employ such varied techniques as etching, aquatint, drypoint, mezzotint, engraving and chine collé. Wood’s imagery plays with the workings of the imagination, materializing as surreal worlds, allegorical compositions, still life, and lush landscapes. He had a profound reverence for all of nature’s creatures, whether pollinator, sea organism, bear or dinosaur, alluding to a fragile planet while celebrating its bounty.

The artist grew up in Richland, Washington where his family owned a plant nursery. Once in Bellingham, he began to take important sojourns in the Canadian Gulf Islands, Amsterdam, Florence, and Venice. Gardening, camping in Eastern and Western Washington, sailing near the San Juan Islands with his wife Pam Brownell, and painting outdoors were his way of life. Wood melded his strong regionalist focus, which included references to indigenous culture, with a keen awareness of European painting traditions, at times reflecting an appreciation for the early American modernist Albert Pinkham Ryder and Canada’s Group of Seven. 

Wood began his artistic career as a printmaker. He studied the medium at Fairhaven College of Western Washington and Cornish Institute in the 1970s, completing his Bachelor of Art at Western in 1980. In that same year he served as apprentice to a master printmaker at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence, Italy. Thomas Wood was able to combine the technical virtuosity of old world printmaking with his uniquely subjective viewpoint, nimbly shifting from meditative to symbolist, from naturalist to surrealist, and from the aesthetic to the ironic. The starting place for many intaglio works were spontaneous doodles in the artist’s sketchbook, often drawn during bouts of insomnia. Imagery from these doodles were further elaborated and improvised during the design of the plate and often rendered with exquisite detail. The results are curious amalgams of humans and animals, dramatic vistas, and strange worlds that unfold for the viewer.

While the printmaking of Thomas Wood’s career was often driven by embrace of the imagination, his pastel works were often rooted in a sense of place. From the 1980s to the early 2000s, he created lush and moody pastel depictions of the Skagit Valley and surrounding areas, evoking a nostalgia for a rural way of life threatened. These intensely pigmented works dramatized the landscape near Thomas Wood’s Bellingham studio. Later he turned to oil painting as the creative complement to his printmaking practice. These two spheres of Thomas Wood’s artistic production—­­intaglio printmaking and oil painting—were practices he maintained simultaneously, balancing the meticulous detail of copper plate etching with the looser touch of his painterly oils.
Wood’s oil paintings frequently centered on the sublime aspects of the Northwest wilderness. Preferring the rhythm and movement of a place, the essence of the experience, to a strict copying of nature, Wood sought out the “elemental feeling” of pristine Northwest locales. The artist refused to see landscape painting as a comfortable activity. He embraced scenarios that challenged him to work quickly and intuitively—capturing rapidly changing weather, or painting outdoors at night, in the cold, and in the rain while his easel slowly filled with water—all of which allowed the painter to become part of the landscape he sensed around him.

Thomas Wood was honored with retrospectives of his intaglio prints at the Whatcom Museum of History and Art, Bellingham, and Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner in 1998 and 1999 respectively. The internationally respected atelier, Il Bisonte, in Florence, where he taught, mounted exhibitions of Wood’s work. In 2012 an exhibition featuring the work also toured Venice and Milan. Thomas Wood’s works are included in countless collections of private individuals and in institutions such as the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, Philadelphia Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Microsoft, University of Washington Medical Center, Whatcom Museum of Art and History, Stanford University, New York Public Library, and the Museum of Northwest Art among others. Over the last decade Wood was commissioned by Nawakum Press to create a series of etchings that accompanied publications of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges and Bruno Schulz. A large-scale mural by the artist graces the Timber Park Pavilion performance stage at Boulevard Park in Bellingham, Washington. Though living with inoperable cancer for the past few years, he enjoyed making art on an almost daily basis and continued to embrace his local community of artists, transitioning his studio into a space for visiting artists to experiment with the printmaking medium he so loved.