Jonny Wood
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I drew and painted freely all the time as a young child and even won a prize exhibiting at Selfridges. But then I stopped it all suddenly when I was 13 and life became more serious. From then onwards art was always missing from life, and looking back its absence niggled away underneath somewhere: an unused sketchpad or watercolours in the bottom of my suitcase.
When I was 48 I took a 6 month sabbatical from my GP work to see what this meant – and
I did courses at Bristol School of Art in sculpture and printmaking. Something inside me woke up, and I haven’t stopped since. I moved from steel sculpture, to drawing, and in the last few years to painting, primarily for the colour. I’m staying with painting – its so difficult and challenging, but at the same time wonderfully free, in fact infinite.
I paint still lifes often, landscapes especially on trips, sometimes helped by photography. But I’m mostly drawn to doing portraits – which I find fiendishly difficult but exciting.