"Symbiosis," Rodney Wood, oil on panel

“SYMBIOSIS”
What: Paintings by Rodney Wood
When: Opening reception 5:30 p.m. today, runs 11 a.m. Saturday and Sunday
Where: A joint exhibition at the Modbo and Rubbish Gallery, 17c East Bijou
Tickets: Free; 633-4240
Something else: 7 p.m. Saturday, cello and vocals of “Lisa’s Show” and Mango fan Django at Rubbish; 7 p.m. Saturday Judeth Shay Burns, Andy Tanner and breakdancing by Soul Mechanics at the Modbo; and artist talk at 1:30 p.m. Sunday at the Modbo.

BY T.D. MOBLEY-MARTINEZ
During his 15 years in Colorado Springs, Rodney Wood was a lot of things to a lot of people: teacher, curator, art maker, art promoter. But not long before he left for Santa Fe in 2006, Wood became passionately committed to being one thing. A painter.

It’s obsession,” Wood says as he picks through the boxes of paintings leaning against a wall in the Modbo. He glances back and laughs as if he’d realized he wasn’t just talking to himself.

Wood is back for an unusual joint exhibition at the Modbo and Rubbish Gallery, which share an opening tonight. The 40 oil-on-panel images in “Symbiosis” take viewers through his moody oeuvre, a style probably best described as magical realism.

Wood finds the box he wants and tugs “Alluvion” out of its bubble-wrap sleeve. As he leans it against the wall, the woman in the blood-red gown emerges from the glare, her leg cocked and a Mona Lisa smile on her still face. This ersatz Ophelia floats there, seemingly having drifted to a spot just off a muddy bank. The dark water ripples around her as if she’s sending out little pulses of yearning — or is that amusement?

It’s a hands-down exquisite painting, but one with a kind of silky subversiveness. Something isn’t quite right here.
That’s Wood — or at least what he strives for in paintings so realistically rendered that you’d be hard pressed to find a single brush stroke. That seamless perfection, that breathtaking beauty is the feint he hopes will draw you into his enigmatic world of over-friendly butterflies, black weather, skulls, velvet-skinned women and animals in oddly human settings.

“A lot of painters like to talk about line, about light, about color, about texture,” he says. And the paintings are beautiful, he’ll admit, but for him, these are about considerably more than that. “But I’m trying to talk about emotion.”

And even as contemporary art wades deeper and deeper into the ironic, anti-beauty aesthetic of post modernism, Wood looks backward to heady, classicist notions of what is art.

“Duchamp once said you learn the rules, you practice the rules, you bend the rules, you break the rules and then, and only then, can you make your own rules.”

Wood is breaking his own rules now.

“Those are the rules that tried to prevent me from picking up painting. You can do this, but you can’t paint. Not anymore.”

He followed his eyes

But in 2002 or ’03, an exhibition of Vermeer’s work at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., woke something profound in Wood.

“We waited in the freezing drizzle, literally for hours,” he says of waiting in line for tickets with his father. Donald Wood, who the younger describes as a cowboy, was not amused. “There was something about the process that got his attention, though. He said you can close your eyes and feel these paintings. He got it.

“It wasn’t an epiphany, but it reminded me of the power of art,” Wood says. “I’m incredibly judgmental about my own work, but (I thought) maybe I’m not aiming high enough.”

Rodney Wood

Those kinds of little nudges kept happening, prodding him to rethink a life of making his own work fit between the demands of daily life; what he called all his “crazy tangents.”

So Wood, who never took a painting class, started painting. And painting and painting.

“It was purely an experiment,” Woods says. “I didn’t care if I failed. I wasn’t deciding that afternoon, I think I’ll be a painter now. I was just painting.”

Then you have to ask what people always ask him: How did you learn to paint like that if you never had a lesson?

“I think it’s a lot about the eyes. I’ve been at it for so long and seen so much art, my eyes kind of guided me through the process.”

Familiar problems
In October 2006, he mounted a show called “Magical Reality” at the Rubbish Gallery. It was his hello and goodbye to the local art scene.

“We lost a great role model for younger artists,” says artist Tom McElroy. “He never gives up, and he also never allows excuses to deter his artistic expression/ambition.”

“I knew too many people here,” Wood says of why he left. “I was too connected to too many people and try as I may, I wasn’t good at saying ‘no.’ I felt, as an artist, I needed to find a way to immerse myself and painting required that.”

But as Wood talks about his time in Colorado Springs, he returns to the lack of contemporary galleries, the inability for artists to make it on art alone, the failed attempts to foster art here, Wood sounds freshly frustrated.

Sean O’Meallie met Wood in ’94, when the young artist approached the gallery owner with his work. Wood, he says, was a foot soldier for the arts here.

“He’s very passionate,” O’Meallie says. “He put his whole heart into this thing. But when circumstances work to defeat you over and over again, you have to protect yourself. I think that’s what he’s done — and again, admirably so.”
Wood admits he was simply tired. “It was just time for someone else to fight the fight.”

After living in Santa Fe for two years, he moved to Ruidoso, N.M., to be around for his dad, who had developed health issues. And to paint, of course. He’s a full-time artist and lives a streamlined life able to accommodate the inevitable gaps between paydays.

Wood has had a handful of shows since he moved — in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, in Newberryport, Mass., and Nashville and has two invitational exhibits in Denmark in the next year. He says he hasn’t found long-term representation yet.

“‘It takes courage to put one of your paintings on the wall,’” he says one of the dealers told him. “‘It’s about emotion and (it’s) not decorative and says something not subtle about the owners.’”

He shrugs.

Here and gone again
You have exactly three days to see “Symbiosis.” Then, Wood drives whatever hasn’t sold back to Ruidoso.
It needs to be an event, they say.

"Aegis," Rodney Wood, oil on panel

“It’s the immediacy thing,” Wood says. “I like that. You snooze, you lose.”

Brett Andrus nods. He’s co-owner of the Modbo and a recently converted acolyte of Wood’s work.

“It’s like a tornado just comes through town,” Andrus says. “Young artists are just going to be blown away with this work.”

Wood looks around the gallery. It’s his first time here: Andrus opened it in April 2009, after a split with Rubbish.

Wood’s not sure what’s going where. The smaller paintings, like one of a tangle of sunflowers and a woman with opaque blind eyes (“That’s a Rodney choice”), may stay at the Modbo, which is more intimate.

Or not, Wood says. “You know, I’ve hung more than 300 shows. (Arranging the work) is more of an art than anything else.”

He’s happy to be back, says Wood, who’s cell number still starts with 719. He’s especially pleased with having a show at Rubbish and the Modbo — “alternative art spaces more devoted to art than many commercial galleries.”

“It’s a unique arrangement,” Wood says of the joint exhibition, which includes splitting commissions. “I’ve never even heard of something like this before.”

Still, “Symbiosis” is something of a departure for both galleries, which typically show the relatively inexpensive work of emerging artists.

“The city is finally looking,” Andrus says, hinting at his gallery’s success, “so we need something to look at.”

And the prices, which range from $1,500 to $11,000.? Will they alienate patrons used to spending considerably less?

“I don’t care,” Andrus says, shaking his head. “People have forgotten value. People think it’s OK to want to pay $80 for a piece of art. … This is a different level of quality.

“I can’t let the market dictate everything. If I did, art would be free.”

Andrus has gone all out, printing more than 3,000 reminder cards. He hopes to draw people from the northern part of town. The fact that many people there tell him it’s too far to his downtown gallery-performance space makes both men shake their heads.

Apparently, some things don’t change.

For printmaker Jean Gumpter, maybe the show will change things — if only a little. “He’s maintaining his role as a community builder by getting a lot of people to go to those galleries,” she says. “Maybe they had never been or didn’t even know it’s there.”