Billis/Williams Gallery is pleased to present Karen Woods: Back and Forth, the gallery’s fourth solo exhibition of paintings by the Idaho-based artist. The exhibition features the artist’s new oil paintings of rainy scenes through car windows and continues through March 21st.
Karen Woods found inspiration in rain-soaked Southern California roadways for her new series. For the last several years, Woods has regularly made the trip between her home in Idaho and Orange County to visit her mother. These paintings are based on photos taken between the airport and her mother’s home – a route she knows like the back of her hand. Returning to this place triggers a host of memories for the artist and a rainy drive somehow makes those memories more poignant.
Woods is known for the intimate size her paintings but with this series has pushed into new territories of scale. Ranging from 10×10 inches to the monumental (for Woods) 40×60 inches, the paintings invite us to join the artist on her travels.
The compositions often include a bit of the car – the edge of a window, a side mirror, the clear curved area left by a windshield wiper – these markers situate the viewer on the journey Woods is on – we are taken inside the vehicle and shown the vignettes that catch Woods’ eye. The paintings reclaim that point in time, explore its detail, and unearth its emotional content.
Woods’ work freezes and compresses a moment of everyday life; then elongates and decelerates it and in so doing, reveals its accompanying emotional weight: its anticipation, reflection, isolation, and longing. And in so doing, Woods shows us how to recognize the transcendent moments offered by the most mundane surroundings of our daily lives.
Karen Woods (b. 1963, Seattle, WA) received her BFA from the California College of the Arts (Oakland, CA) in 1987 with additional studies at California Polytechnic State University and Studio Art Centers International, Florence, Italy. Her paintings have been exhibited throughout the United States with solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, and Boston, among others, and her work has been published in New American Paintings, American Art Collector, art ltd, Artweek, Western Art & Architecture, Fine Art Connoisseur, and the Idaho Statesmen. Woods’ paintings are included the public collections of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, UK, James Castle House, Boise, ID, Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID (acquisition), Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, Cedar Rapids, IA (acquisition), The Art Museum of Eastern Idaho, Boise State University, Cary Street Partners LLC, Charlotte, NC, and the Boise Visual Chronicle as well as number private collections in the US and UK. Karen Woods lives and works in Boise, Idaho.
