“No longer do stones, springs, trees or animals speak to man, nor can he speak to them. Through scientific understanding our world has become dehumanized.” ~ C.G.Jung.
Landscape painting is an unfashionable genre. Many people regard the landscape with unease, for its association is rough and unsophisticated.
Most of us today live urban lives, out of balance with the natural world. All around us lies evidence of our neglect, for the culture we have constructed is in contrast, even in opposition, to the wildness of the natural world.
My paintings are therefore an attempt to address this imbalance, to bring the outside in. I am a figurative painter at present looking at woodland and at coastline. There is meaning and virtue in landscape which can have a positive effect on our living and working spaces.
These are metre large canvases painted out in the field. They take a full day to paint in a race against cold, hunger and the dying of the light. They attempt to make order of the riot of the natural world to present a field of contemplation to urban man.
- Hugh Danwood
HuHugh Dunford Wood has worked as an independent artist designer since student days at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art in the 1970s. He made a good living painting landscapes and portraits; he ran a fashion business for 15 years handpainting mens’ ties with a team of 24 artists under his direction. He designs crockery, jewelry, furnishing fabrics and wallpapers.
He is a member of The Devon Guild of Craftsmen, Artist Member of the Royal Western Academy, Visiting Tutor at West Dean College, and was guest lecturer at Open University of the Arts. As a volunteer he ran art workshops through the London’s Passage night shelter, where he developed the Streetwise Artpack for homeless people. He ran art courses for detainees at Campsfield Removal Center, and at HMP Belmarsh and other prisons. He worked on a portrait project with prisoners in Philadelphia Correctional Facility, USA.
Artist in Residence at The Royal Shakespeare Company (where he developed an art therapy course with actors), and the Globe Theatre when it first opened in 2000, and The Museum of Bermuda Art in 2009 to mark of the 400th anniversary of settlement. He has also been Artist in Residence with the Church of England in London.
He has exhibited widely in London and abroad with work in the collections of the V&A Museum, Christchurch & other Colleges at the University of Oxford, various County Councils, and private collections in Europe and America.
Hugh has always been keen to demystify and disseminate the role of the arts, co-founding the first Open Studio Weeks in Britain in 1983, in Oxfordshire, and the Lyme Regis ArtsFest in 2003. He curates the pop-up National Gallery of Lyme Regis for Dorset Arts Weeks.
Hugh likes to encourage others to develop their creative potential, as he has been fortunate in his life. He initiated a series of creative exercises while Artist in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and subsequently developed these with prison inmates, homeless men & women, asylum seekers and refugees.
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