Connie Wood’s work springs from her attempt to see the natural world and its inhabitants clearly, to explore, discover and uncover its patterns and layers, and to share what she sees. The most recent work explores the vastness of the great southwestern canyonlands distilled to its essence in abstraction. Wood’s work reflects her vision of the geography and sense of place. Layers of history and discovery through accretion and excavation in Wood’s paintings become metaphor for her experience. Artistic process mimics natural process: building up and carving away, sedimentation and erosion. Wood draws on the intuitive and the decisive while applying and effacing the multiple layers of paint and wax, freeing the viewer from the distractions of literal depiction.
Wood gives a nod to the Abstract Expressionists in her work. These artists valued spontaneity and improvisation, and they accorded the highest importance to process. The imagery was primarily abstract. Even when depicting images based on visual realities, they favored a highly abstracted mode. From Wood's internalized landscapes she extracts memories of visual impressions— the vastness, the light, the shifting colors and textures, then distills her experience to its essence using encaustic wax, oil paint, and cold wax on panel.