Artist: Clare Woods

These paintings above, Woods says, are painted from many photographs taken at night. She would put use the camera flash to photograph undergrowth.

Woods works from photographs of British landscapes back in her studio.

Visually ambiguous, sometimes disturbing and definitely claustrophobic, it is as though Woods is telling us through her representation of rocks and tangled vegetation about her own conflicted relationship with the rural environment. Having studied and lived in London for many years, she moved to the country relatively recently, and finds she has experienced feelings of alienation from and ambivalence about both city and countryside, but in different ways.

https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/what-s-on/arts/a-larger-landscape-and-an-epic-sense-of-place-1-3894999

Some of the images are full of foreboding, the encroachment of nature on a human being entering the corridors of ancient rock which threaten to engulf and even devour. Others are imbued with playful pinks and aquas, suggestive not just of seething ecology but of complete worlds encased secretly by the granite. 

https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/what-s-on/arts/a-larger-landscape-and-an-epic-sense-of-place-1-3894999

“I wanted some of the pieces to have a collaged feel and create a world within the landscape. I also wanted the pieces to work with the landscape of the gallery,”

Quote of Woods, https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/what-s-on/arts/a-larger-landscape-and-an-epic-sense-of-place-1-3894999

Woods has a strong sense of both working within a pastoral tradition in British art, but of also trying to extend boundaries in how responses to landscape are expressed.

https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/what-s-on/arts/a-larger-landscape-and-an-epic-sense-of-place-1-3894999

The landscapes of Clare Woods are about as far removed from the sublime as you can possibly get.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/sep/24/clare.woods

Interesting how Woods uses blocks of swirling paint and colour to form semi-recognisable landscapes in her more recent work.
It is interesting to look at her work to understand the atmosphere she creates in the variety of paintings.