Nicola Wood

by Catherine Milner, 2024

 

Nicola Wood’s artistic journey, much like the looping highways of the Hollywood hills where she now lives, has been shaped by unexpected twists and turns, yet always remained firmly on the path of painting.

Wood’s cover design for the first edition of first edition of Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana.

This exhibition focuses on a key period in her career when she was painting abstract pictures between 1957 and 1978. The paintings, rich in texture and colour, reflect her intuitive approach to painting – evolving from spontaneous layers of burnt orange and umber to lighter, more complex and geometrically intricate pictures – mirroring in their brighter colours the renewed sense of optimism that emerged in Britain during the late 1960s.

‘Abstract Expressionism was not an intellectual process for me’, she says. ‘I didn’t visualise a painting and then create it. I responded to colour, to form, to what I noticed around me’. The crinkled bark of a tree or the intricate details of a bee on a windowsill which she observed under a magnifying glass, became catalysts for her exploration of colour and shape. Each stroke, each combination of hues, led to the next in a stair-step progression of discovery, with Wood responding to the emerging design as it unfolded before her.

Born in Great Crosby, Lancashire, in 1936, Wood’s early life was shaped by the tumult of the Second World War. She recalls not bombs dropping – although a house two doors down from hers was completely destroyed – but the image of her mother shaking her fists at enemy planes overhead and the childhood thrill of running through fields scarred by bomb craters.

Identified for her prodigious talent at the age of ten, she was encouraged by her teacher to attend Southport School of Art & Craft, where, aged fifteen, she benefitted, like many of her generation, from the post-war reforms offering free education for all and, at art school, a rigorous skills-based training in life drawing, painting, and anatomy.

‘The earliest memory I have of my art is a desire to create,’ Wood reflects. ‘The first time I used a pencil to draw a line, I knew I could create things by drawing them. I copied dresses from fashion magazines. I drew animals and buildings. I was fascinated by what I was creating. That sense continued throughout my life as an artist. If I had a work in progress, I awoke in the morning and rushed to look at what I had painted the previous day.’

Her classical education in precision and line, form and structure, became a crucial part of her later work. But, despite her clear talent for painting, when Wood enrolled at Manchester Regional Art School, aged seventeen,  she was steered towards textile design – reflecting the gender biases of the time. ‘I wanted to be in the Painting School,’ she recalls, ‘but I was told, “no, no, no – you’re a girl, you should do Fashion and Textiles.”’

While this diversion could have stifled Wood’s ambitions, it instead opened for her a new avenue of creative expression and she embraced this new form with the same curiosity and boldness that marked her painting.

For two centuries Manchester had been the ‘Cottonopolis’, at the heart of the UK’s textile industry and, apart from drawing on the wealth of practical experience available, it introduced Wood to colour and pattern in a way that broadened her artistic palette. ‘I didn’t like cutting patterns,’ she admits, ‘but I loved the freedom in the textile department where paint was splashed around.’

Wood in 1960. Silk screening at the RCA

Three years later, in 1960, she secured a place at the Royal College of Art in London. There, she was among a new generation of rising stars – David Hockney, Peter Blake, Pauline Boty – artists from working class backgrounds who would later become icons of the Pop Art movement. The fashion designer Zandra Rhodes was also a contemporary and recalls the big impression Wood made: ‘Nicola was very spirited, very prolific and very flamboyant. You could see how talented she was in whatever she tackled,’ she says.

During her time at the RCA, Wood was introduced to the book Art Since 1945 (1958), edited by Michael S. Fox, which gave examples of a variety of abstract techniques which she employed. ‘Abstraction gave me a new source for creativity,’ she said. ‘I was not limited to the colours and shapes of pre-existing objects. I was free to express my reactions to what I noticed in the world.’

These works are not about sending a message or making a statement, she insists. Instead, they are deeply personal expressions of her emotional and visual engagement with the world. ‘Life is what you notice,’ Wood often says, encapsulating the essence of her creative process.

While her abstract work took centre stage during this period, her career took yet another turn after graduating with First Class Honours from the RCA; she became one of only two women to have ever been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship from the RCA to study at Parsons School of Design in New York. While there, working in a studio in Bleeker Street, adjacent to Tom Wesselmann’s, she found herself overwhelmed with new commissions. ‘I had more work than I could handle, and I was supposed to be only studying,’ she recalls. They were numerous commissions for book jackets as well as textiles, including the first edition of Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana, which she illustrated with a dashing ink painting of the beast on a lime green background.

Upon her return to London in 1964, Wood immediately began to collaborate with iconic brands such as Heal’s, Liberty and Biba, translating her abstract paintings into textile designs that transformed domestic spaces with their painterly qualities. Heal’s had actually spotted her earlier when she was still at the RCA and commissioned her to design works like Vibrations – a striped, wavy design that reflected the influence of Op Art paintings and which sold bolts of fabric totalling eight and a half miles on its first printing.

At the Royal College of Art

Wood occupied an adjacent studio to the portraitist and landscape artist Jane Percival in Notting Hill Gate. Here, she was surrounded by a coterie of painters, poets and playwrights including Michael Hastings and Michael Horowitz, and fashion deisgners like Ossie Clarke, who lived two doors away.

‘It was a hotbed of creativity,’ Wood says. ‘But to us, it was just life. If I had been conscious of it, I would have respected it more. I would never have guessed that the people I was at college with would become so famous. We were just all so involved in our own work.’

In the late 1970s, after a highly successful career in textile design, Wood made a decisive return to painting. ‘I was so well-rounded, I was able to switch seamlessly into oils,’ she notes. At first, she focused exclusively on abstract work, continuing to develop the spontaneous, intuitive process that had defined her earlier paintings. Her organic approach allowed her to forge a deep personal connection with each work, with the painting itself becoming a living accomplice in the creative process.

‘When I am creating, the artwork becomes a partner who compels a certain brush stroke or colour choice or pattern,’ she says. ‘I do not know what to expect. The world of the painting is an unknown. I want to explore. It draws me in. I feel I am mixing myself into the painting along with the paint.’

Wood’s relocation to Los Angeles in 1978 marked the beginning of a new chapter in her artistic career and, with it, a new aesthetic. The light and landscape of California had long exerted a powerful influence on her imagination, and it was in 1984, while driving through the city, that she ‘saw a gleaming 1959 Cadillac and knew I had to paint the car. That was my artistic epiphany. From that moment, everything changed,’ she says. The sleek lines and reflective surfaces of classic American cars became the central subject of Wood’s paintings, marking a significant stylistic shift from her earlier work.

This exhibition of Nicola Wood’s earlier works reveals the foundation upon which her entire artistic practice was built and demonstrates how British art of the postwar era is a testament to its art schools.

‘Gratitude for my education and training has been a cornerstone of my life as an artist,’ says Wood. ‘When asked how I could create such designs by hand, I answer, ‘That is what we were trained to do.’ I make my response plural because my classmates and I were trained in a classical manner. Life drawing with models – nude and in costume – was in my earliest curriculum. In Manchester, one of our models was a horse. Proportion was studied rigorously, and David Hockney – for one – is a master of proportion.’

Her story is also emblematic of the challenges faced by female artists in the mid-20th century. Despite being steered away from painting, she refused to bow to society’s norms and, therefore, her legacy lies not only in the remarkable body of work she has created but also in the example she sets for future generations to stay true to their vision.

‘Confidence provides the impetus to change and meet challenges. In that regard, my education has been essential to my life as an artist. Shortly after I began to paint in oils, I lost sight in one eye. I knew I could continue my life as an artist because of my training, and I did.’

 

 

 

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