Luke Judge

If you are among those who love the landscape features of our beautiful Northwest Coast region, then you’ll find much to like in the paintings and etchings of Thomas Wood currently at the Lisa Harris Gallery.

More than 40 works celebrate the forests, mountains, valleys, water features and skies of our chosen land. Most of these crisp yet impressionistic images, done with bold colors and stark outlines, began as plein-air works painted on panel during Wood’s many wilderness sojourns.

The cerebral Wood is a passionate outdoorsman who says, “Camping is kind of like research.” He loads his canoe with easel, paints and brushes along with his camping equipment, finds a good site and settles in for a few days to paint. Back in the studio, many of these paintings serve as models for etchings or larger works on linen.

The night paintings are especially compelling. In them the bold daytime colors become more subtle and the forms somewhat metaphysical. These paintings shimmer, often with arrays of stars — the dippers, Orion and other constellations — spread through the infinite space of the heavens.

A typical evening scene is “Summer Night — Cypress Head.” Look carefully, and you’ll be amply rewarded. The tiny figure of a man silhouetted in the dimming light tends an orange-flamed campfire. Across the water a window — well, we think it’s a window — is a beacon against the darkened land mass and creates a wavy orange reflection on the quiet waters.

The foreground shows a mug and a carefully assembled bouquet of orange and yellow flowers on a camp table. Above it all … the first stars of night. This is a painting of juxtapositions: woods against shore, day becoming night, and the natural and man-made worlds coming together.

When asked which painters have most influenced him, Wood is quick to mention the Modernist Marsden Hartley, the Northwest’s own Guy Anderson and the 19th-century American Albert Pinkham Ryder, whose allegorical works inspire some of Wood’s own pieces.

In addition to painting, Wood is an imaginative printmaker who experiments with texture, color and intensity. In his prints, Rembrandt, the master of light and dark, and Dürer, who invented the way to study form with line, serve as influences. There are two prints in the current exhibition, “Moon Rising — Sucia” and “Music Boat.” Pay attention to tone in both, and in “Sucia” to line. “Music Boat,” with its phantasmagoric undersea, brings to mind some of the work by Hieronymus Bosch.

Nancy Worssam:

easels impressionistic images, landscape features, marsden hartley, northwest coast, tiny figure, yellow flowers