New Establishment: Jonas Wood

You don’t paint from life. Has this always been your preferred way of working?

I think painting from images just lends itself more to the work of collaging and cutting up and moving things around. It suits me, it’s interesting. Painting from life felt like I was being pushed through a small, very narrow area that I didn’t ever feel comfortable in. It’s also hard as fuck to paint from life! But I’m not beholden to photographs. I like to use their structure, and I like to strip them of the thing that I want and use them for myself. It’s all problem solving, what’s going on in that image, you know?

You’ve spoken before about the subject matter having to be personal to you. Is this something that you have felt as a constant throughout your career?

Well, I think the question has been a constant, and I can answer it in the same way. Why do I paint the things that I paint? I can’t just do a portrait of you because you asked me to do it. Because it’s not going to be good and I’m not going to care about it. I know that I could paint a variety of things. I could go outside and say I want to paint a tree, or a squirrel, or an aeroplane. I think the question I am saying to myself is: is it going to be important enough for me to paint that I am going to carry this through? Painting is not as romantic as a lot of people think. My shit is so constructed in a way, and what I’m trying to present to you would be so mundane if I didn’t care about it.

Over the years have any pieces had a big impact on your practice?

I think the experience of growing up with great artwork in my house had a huge impact. My grandfather collected a bunch of pretty important art from the sixties and seventies that I got to live with, so Bacon, Warhol and Lichtenstein. I didn’t really realize until later when I studied in school how insane it was that I lived with those things. The experience of being around a lot of artists, but never having the pressure to actually be an artist was kind of a big deal.

You’ve spoken about the violence that was in your early work.

I didn’t really recognize it at the time. My collaging process is really fucking sly right now—well, not really that sly because you know that everything is collage. But, as you can imagine, it was like Edward Scissorhands at the beginning. OK, I’ll put it this way because it’s funny. There was a kid I went to grad school with and he said, “You have this crazy wild horse inside of you, and you need to learn how to ride it.” It was aggressive then, and it’s still aggressive now in the way that I make it. But as you can imagine you become more finessed.

You grew up in Boston. Do you still feel the influence of it on your work?

Of course, it shaped the eighteen years that I lived there. Lots of my interiors and portraits are all influenced by growing up in that house. Then I went to college in upstate New York, which took me a little further from Boston and I was really figuring out who I was. Then when I moved to the West Coast in Seattle, I really changed the pace. The difference between Boston and Seattle is insane. There is some pretentious coffee shit but barely any. People are selling weed on the street, it was like Amsterdam. I met my wife there and we moved to LA. I got a job and learnt how to paint. I was just really inspired, the pace of life is really great for me. It sounds obvious but there was a moment of self-discovery in moving to Los Angeles, and this sort of freedom.