Brian Wood

Orpheus, at his death: his mystic’s body torn apart and cast to the waiting landscape. His head, held tenderly by the river Hebrus, sings as it floods to wider seas. Inside that sacred vessel, streaming on to Lesbos, live songs of underworld and ecstasy.

The boundaries and limits of consciousness hold for me a particular fascination and it seems likely the obsessions in my work derive from the earliest phase of life before language and before self. Pleasure, suffering, sensing, aggression, devouring and expelling merge in a timeless non-reflective realm. The pre-lingual lack of separation from Mother and the undifferentiated flow of our infant world quickly give way to difference, boundaries, language, and time—a split requisite for a functioning ego and a requirement for personal feeling and rational thought, but while necessary, also traumatic. Awareness longs for the moment before! I long to hold that moment before image-become-language is forced into service as identity, self, and workaday narcissism.

When I paint, I feel I’m invoking a living being—responding to its needs, following its urgings, serving its ferocity, revealing its presence. What does it want from me? As imaginal space opens and forms arise, I honor the intensity of these pre-linguistic images before they tip toward language, narrative, and discursive thought. As intimacy deepens, the painting looks back at me as intently as I see into it and the illusory distance between inner and outer worlds burns into one vast space where mutual being is possible.

Trauma experienced again but then transfigured into something expansive, and to me, beautiful—this is the realm of freedom. Painting as a vessel where anything might be born and where transformations fluoresce without restrictions of concept or utility. Like love.