Marie Wood’s ‘J-Dreaming’ exhibition to open in Westport

‘J-Dreaming’ is the latest exhibition of eclectic mixed media, paintings and drawings by artist Marie Wood. It is a play on words of daydreaming and J, Marie’s husband of 52 years. In a striking image she has “joined the two images of this beautiful landscape and this beautiful man”. It is her third solo exhibition at Westport Town Hall and marks the celebration of its 10th anniversary of opening.

Marie doesn’t make art to sell it, she makes it because she ‘needs to’. She will see something and has to respond artistically. Although officially a professional artist for the last twenty five years, it is something she has always done and understands the world in a visual way. She explains her work “sings with the excitement of unplanned informed intuition” because it “relies on happenstance and accidental mark making so there is no pattern to follow.”

Woodlands have always drawn her in, especially the spaces between the trees and the darkness that leads you on and on and further on to places unknown. She loves the excitement of not just seeing the trees but the spaces between them. There are spaces between and beyond that people don’t always seen.

It will be a new departure for her as an artist to have a group of work focusing on eight drawings of woodlands. She made a work station in her kitchen and instead of going to her studio and immersing in colour and paint, she started a series of drawings, which emerged from zen-like experiences and drew on her own resilience after a difficult year in terms of health. This exhibition is about love, life, art and a partnership. J is the person who gets Marie through these exhibitions.

Marie breaks the rules in any possible way she can. Breaking the rules in art is important because “once you learn the rules, sometimes they take over and you lose the sense of the aesthetic, the thing that you are trying to express and it just becomes photographic or it becomes boring. It becomes boring and its not art.”

To break the rules, you need to know how colour works, how perspective works. You hang onto rules because you know about what things can do. You can allow yourself to see what happens. She uses the example of being told, “‘never take a photograph pointing your camera into the sun.” Why? “Unless you're trying to produce a perfect picture. You know, pointing a camera into the sun can bring about the most amazing effects, which can take you on another journey that you never even expected. So, breaking the rules, using materials in a different way than you were taught can just take you to that place that artists are all looking for, which is that pinnacle of expression which reveals the truth in the subject that you're looking at.”

The exhibition will have its official opening at 6pm on Wednesday, June 4 at Westport Town Hall.