Robert Bark Wood.
I am a whimsical fool… And failed editor. Misfit. Monkish. Deliberate in living a life. I have created "art" in many forms over my lifetime as a classically trained ballet dancer in my youth, a culinary artist in commercial kitchens and event venues and as a mad collagist, textile painter and abstract expressionist at every stage of life starting with flour paste glue and a ball of twine the size of my head at the age of six.
It is working across these fields which informs all I do. From the wet mold techniques learned from handling forcemeats and delicate doughs to the frenzied but disciplined aesthetic of ballet port de bras transferred into the hand manipulation of canvas and paper. I love it all. In this regard, I have much in common with a washed hog.
I've learned to look at what lies at my feet...a crack in the ground, a tuft of grass or some crushed debris and to see beauty in that. Exploring and teaching (more exactly learning) in developing countries over past years has influenced both my values as a human and aesthetics as an artist. Discovering beauty in the context of grinding poverty was pivotal.
Live largely by imagination and always have… Excites me to work between mediums creating impressions from paint, foliage, wasps' nests, disintegrating book pages and driftwood, a process I explored with abundant local materials while living in Southeast Asia. Left Luggage of Gnome Island is both as complex and primal to me as the narrative it both does and does not reveal.
When our eyes see through the heart, life explodes with beauty… Thanks for seeing here.