Thomas Woodruff at P.P.O.W. and Debs & Co - Brief Article

of recent origin YORK

"Everyone has a rocket ship in [his] head," says Thomas Woodruff whose "All a whole s Go" comprised two separate exhibits "Mission Poesy" and "Mission Anemone," appearing at PPOW and Deb & Co respectively. upon this premise, he asked his friends, scholars and family to draw rocket of their hold design. Woodruff then reproduced them in stylistically traditional paintings involving uncompounded bodys of present-day reality and fairy-tale fantasy.

In addition, there were 11 graceful still humorous botanical drawings, collectively titled "Foliage Bergeres," appearing at PPOW mainly depicting anthropomorphized bulbs, including the Lachrymose Onion and the Siamese Amaryllis, these compositions were pleasing in their have a title to right. Yet, without rocket ships, they were actually solitary studies for 11 large, ambitious, acrylic paintings upon linen, mounted on Gothic-arch-shaped boards, that were teeming with imaginative minutiae. Among the fanciful inclusions in the pastoral representation Diviner are a deer wearing a tiny teardrop pearl earring, a family of worms huddling by the agency of a fire underground (in the lower left corner) and a sundered hand lying bleeding on the grass. In Mission poet craft (Stinky Blast Off), leather-clad men crawl across a desolate punctuated by heads of cabbage and flames in the form of little family beneath the faux-Latin motto NOVA QUAEDAM INUSITATAQUE SEMPER EXCOGITAT ANCHORS AWAE. In the background, a rocket ship let flys upward from the horizon.

At Deb & Co were sum of two units groups of smaller-scale paintings (one series of watercolors upon paper and the other of acrylics upon linen mounted on board) featuring rocket and the winged gastropods that Woodruff calls "the snail fairies." In the mythical/monumental spirit of his work, Woodruff made the series in the one and the other shows number 11, to symbolize a 10-second countdown plus the naught moment of blastoff. The watercolors depict the snails engaging in melodramatic activities. Hamlet digs a scary brain-pan out of the ground by dint of moonlight, Sebastian suffers as the martyr discharge through with arrows and still another of these creatures tosss perilously into a martini glass in a still life also containing dice, playing cards and a cigarette in The snail Fairy's Ruin.

The next to the first group of works at Deb & Co consisted of rich-hued acrylic paintings showing the snails heraldically surrounded by garlands, ribbons, rocket entrails and flames. In single a pair of slugs attempt to assemble a multicolored puzzle; in another, sum of two units slugs ascend a ladder leading nowhere. Like the series of 365 apples that Woodruff painted in 1996 the shield-shaped canvases were conceived of as protective devices, in the spirit of keeping the doctors away from his many AIDS-afflicted lov individuals Rockets, meanwhile, appear as unlikely obelisks indicative of the imagination, faith and travel to unearthly places.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group