Jonas Wood (b. 1977, Boston, Massachusetts) builds paintings from an accumulation of personal photographs, drawings, and collaged fragments, flattening perspective and repeating pattern until an interior, a still life, or a portrait takes on the charged, slightly vertiginous quality of a room remembered rather than simply seen.
Wood earned a BA in psychology from Hobart and William Smith Colleges before studying painting and drawing at the University of Washington in Seattle. After graduate school he moved to Los Angeles and spent several years working for the painter Laura Owens, an experience he has described as "like grad school, part two." His process typically begins with a photograph, which he redraws, collages, and enlarges in stages, removing depth cues and outlining forms until multiple viewpoints and flattened planes coexist within a single canvas, a compression that owes as much to studio photo-collage as to painting itself.
Wood shares a studio and a life with the ceramicist Shio Kusaka, his wife since 2002; the exchange between them is visible in specific, recurring motifs rather than a general influence, the striped and dotted patterns of Kusaka's pots recur as motifs within Wood's still lifes and interiors, while the compositions of his paintings have in turn shaped the surface designs Kusaka paints onto clay. Wood's subjects range across studio interiors filled with plants and ceramics, portraits, and sports imagery drawn from his own history as a collector of trading cards, each treated with the same flattened, densely patterned language rather than as distinct genres.
His work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum at UCLA in 2010 and a major survey at the Dallas Museum of Art in 2019, and is held in museum collections across the United States. He maintains active drawing and printmaking practices alongside his paintings.
