ISSY WOOD IS ALL OUT OF SORTS

What's underneath all that shine, baby?

Issy Wood is an American artist living in London. Her distinctively up-close-and-personal oil paintings of mundane objects, anatomy, and material textures have been accumulating attention online and in the art world lately. Working as a writer and singer as well, she’s a multitalented creative and prolific painter.

When I first saw Wood’s work, I first felt a low-level unsettledness. If you experience her art like me, her paintings might make you feel a little strange, but they do so quietly. Nothing is overtly gross, violent, or off-putting, and yet they just sort of.. get under your skin.

Her paintings have a disassociated nature; they leave you in search of harmony or understanding and end up giving you none. Her eye looms close to its subjects, portraying them from mere inches away. It’s pretty uncomfortable. (In interviews, she talks about how this is somewhat of a goal of hers- that she takes peoples’ discomfort with her work to be a compliment). A lot of Wood’s works have a quality of softened vision and light while being shrouded in a dark, dull air.

Wood says that her subjects must be things she finds a little bit hideous. “There are objects I’d like to both paint and own, but most of what I paint I have to find hideous in at least one way.” (From the blog Blackbird Skyplane here on Substack). This preference makes for a body of work that bounces between charming, insidious, and always a bit off-putting.

“Get a towel and some smoke” - 2019 - oil on linen.

Although her distinctive hand makes for a coherence across paintings, Issy selects subject matter from a wide but characteristic range of subjects. She particularly likes jackets, clocks, car seats, funny little ceramics, toilets and sinks, teeth, etc. Her compositions somehow combine hyper-realism, surrealism, at-times impressionistic line qualities, cartoon-ish, and comical styles all at once. It’s not something you can pin down.

“Underdose” - 2019.

Look at the colors on those teeth!! (I’m in love)

“Alien / Worry” -2019 - oil on linen.

Wood’s work pretty much lacks joy or hopefulness. It’s about being let down. She has told interviewers that: “A lot of my subject matter is chosen for its promise of the pristine, and I’ve assigned myself the task of showing how this promise is broken almost every time.”

Even when capturing an object in complete detail, Issy’s work dodges any concrete conceptual realism by choosing unnatural proximities and emphasizing only the plain visual facts of mundane objects. -- I think this part of why her work can make the viewer feel so alienated. Her paintings let you get up close to an object and simultaneously cause you to feel distant from it.

“Go Daddy! (naming names)” - 2022 - oil on velvet.

Sometimes, she juxtaposes a selection of objects and materials, as in these collections of tiny canvases above.

"Courtship! Valuables! For Fun!" - 2021

“General sphinx medley” - 2019 - oil on velvet.

If you take a look at some of her many collections, it should become apparent that the majority of Wood’s work consists solely of depictions of solitary object(s). Vintage ceramics, car interiors, leather jackets… often times nothing more. She seems to be focused on capturing humanity’s obsession with shiny, solid things and the value that we attribute to them. I particularly like this painting above because I take it as poking fun at upper-class, imperialist obsessions with precious objects and the act of collecting in general. Ancient busts and sculptures are some of the most valuable and highly protected objects in the modern world, and yet the meaningful reality of them belongs entirely to ancient civilizations.

Wood’s painting gives us a second, more real look: they have missing noses, they look fucking weird, and they’re old as hell! She portrays them as they exist in the modern wealthy mind: their origins and histories are pretty much arbitrary. They exist in a medley. Once these ancient objects become status symbols set out for private ownership, they are drained of meaning.

“Too Easy (froth)” - 2020 - oil on linen

“Stock, Live” - 2022 - oil on linen.

“The hen night” - 2019 - oil on linen.

Above, some vague shape with little people climbing on it. I think it’s supposed to be a teapot made of some organic material. (Maybe inspired by Meret Oppenheim’s Luncheon in Fur?)

“Actual car 2” -2019 - oil on velvet

“I’m convinced the way I configure these otherwise alluring products and garments often lowers them, literally, in tone, or happily switches them from being an advert to an expression of perversion, in the way painting can do.” (found on phillips.com)

Untitled - 2016 - oil on linen.

(A headless wig floating on a black background.) One of her most haunting, I think.

Wood’s art looks you in the face with a dead, straight ahead stare. It’s funny, dark, and all too real. Until I can see her work in person some day, I’ll be busy combing through all the dampened, weird glamour that her many paintings hold.

(btw: I was unable to find titles for all un-captioned artwork above. My apologies.)

until later! subscribe if u enjoyed :)

-Ell