Interview with Jake Wood-Evans

27/02/20

Interview with Jake Wood-Evans

Jake Wood-Evans: Relic

The Gallery, Winchester Discovery Centre

10 January – 29 March 2020

Entering the Gallery at Winchester Discovery Centre is currently something like entering a church or sacred space. The lighting is low and focused on the large, arch-topped canvases, created especially for this exhibition by Hastings-based artist Jake Wood-Evans.

Wood-Evans’s work derives from his fascination with the baroque, especially, in this instance, with the grand altarpieces by the likes of Rubens and Van Dyck. However, after marking out the basic figuration of his version of the painting he is working from, he then sets about removing elements, pushing the paint about in its fluidity, mixed with turps and linseed oil. His resulting imagery sits somewhere between figuration and abstraction – with an element of the meditative – inviting viewers to bring their own interpretation and narrative to the traces and relics of what has been, both on Wood-Evans’s own canvases, and on the canvases of the original paintings, with the passing of time, added layers of varnish, and restorative work, all leaving their mark. 

Studio International spoke to Wood-Evans about his inspirations and his process.

Watch the interview here

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Published in the Winter 2018 issue of Art Quarterly

Review of The Birth of Cinema… and Beyond: An Exhibition of Painting and Video at rosenfeld porcini

09/09/13

The Birth of Cinema… and Beyond

An Exhibition of Painting and Video

rosenfeld porcini

3 July – 21 September 2013

Before the invention of cinema in the 19^th century, visual art was one of the primary means for storytelling, alongside oral and written traditions. When Christians entered a church and saw a painting recounting a Biblical episode, they knew the narrative surrounding it so well that they could virtually see the action unfolding in their mind’s eye; similarly, Old Master paintings of Greek and Roman myths could easily conjure up vivid and dramatic denouements in the imaginations of their educated viewers. As the third of their annual themed exhibitions, Fitzrovia art gallery rosenfeld porcini, whose partner gallery, Galleria Napolinobilissima in Italy, regularly shows Old Master works, brings together newly commissioned works by seven contemporary artists and, for the first time, works from the directors’ collections by ten Old Masters, looking at the tradition of narrative artwork, both prior to and since the birth of cinema.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/the-birth-of-cinema