Disarmingly humble, and averse to any theorization that privileges the mind over the eye, Gwyn talks about finding truth and beauty “in the way things are.”
As landscape painting marks the state of our conception of nature, Gwyn paints to familiarize viewers to shift their contemporary vision. He creates panoramas to invoke both the sense of proportion and the involvement inherent to cinema, which can slowly lead the eye through sensuous ribbons of Western scenery.
His downward-canted, aerial vantages reveal a land we’ve come to better understand through the technologies of aerial photography and satellite surveillance – an Earth equally expanded and neutralized by distance. In fact, Gwyn tries to show viewers a world that needs art more than ever before because it is only through the artist’s hand that we can re-humanize a new sense of space.
Woody Gwyn was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1944, and received his arts education from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. For the past forty years, his work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions including the Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel; le Centre Nationale des Arts Plastiques, Paris, France; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe.
