Welcome to arthurwoods.ch ...
My latest painting: Januar / January, 2012 - 70 x 100 cm
This website is designed to present my most recent works - paintings, drawings and objects. My work has been an long evolution of artistic exploration reflecting my personal experiences and insights into nature and the cosmos.
My current work consists mostly of paintings about nature as I am focused on the portraying the wonder and the complexity of my immediate surroundings. Mostly, I try to create convincing illusions of scenes of the Swiss countryside where the viewer is invited to enter into my painted landscapes. My focus is on the trees, grasses, meadows, streams and rivers. Rarely does one find man-made objects in my paintings - sometimes just a fence post on the side of a path. My current goal as an artist is to connect my artistic explorations to my immediate environment so that that others may also share and enjoy a few special moments that I have discovered and tried to capture on canvas.
We live in a time when human impact in the environment is having major consequences on the well being of all other life sharing our planet. I consider it extremely important today to pay closer attention to our immediate surroundings. We should not forget that our survival and well being are dependent on highly complex ecosystem that consists of all the rest of life on this planet. Indeed how we as a species confront the coming climate crisis will require each of us to establish an intimate and personal relationship with the rest of nature that envelops and nutures us.
My approach to painting has been inspired by the the insights of particle physicists whose description of the universe at the microcosmic level consisting of sub-atomic particles existing in an inseparable network of interactions involving a ceaseless flow of energy which gives rise to the stable structures of the material world.
The main message in my art is that everything exists in a universe that is interconnected and interdependent. All form that we encounter and contemplate - including ourselves - is connected to everything else and all matter is in a perpetual state of transience. As such, I consider all of my art to have a "cosmic dimension" - a dimension which spans both the microcosmic to the macrocosmic realms. Not only is this an intellectual position that I have adopted since the early 70s, but also this aspect should be evident in the painting technique that I have developed and refined over the years.
