Wilfred Wood is an artist with whom you need to exercise a degree of judgement. He turned out large numbers of chocolate-box watercolours (and a few colour woodcuts) that belie the thorough training he had at Manchester School of Art, the Central School of Arts and Crafts and the Slade. He was born in the Cheshire village of Cheadle Hulme in 1888 but the only records of him exhibiting colour woodcuts were in 1938 when he showed Cadaques (below) alongside Cineraria and Ronda Bridge. I have com across only twelve colour woodcuts and have included all the ones I think have real merit. I have never come across either Cineraria or Ronda Bridge and no doubt there are one or two others lying around somewhere.
One interesting aspects of Wood's prints is the influence of the poster designs and colour linocuts of the thirties. Wood produced at last one poster showing Michaelmas Daisies for London Underground and although he could use the woodblock with great assurance as he did in the view below, it was print like Willows, Cambridge (top) and Cadaques where his mastery of colour and design were most apparent. In Cadaques he relied solely on perspective and shadow to build the print. There was falling back on outline and it is little wonder he was in Arezzo in 1922 to see Piero della Francesca's frescos. His subtle use of pure colour and his sense of harmony were as much as part of Piero's own work as perspective was. Few of the colour woodcut artists of the period showed as much sympathy with the work of the European masters apart from S.G. Boxsius.
His academic concern with architecture and perspective led him in an unusual direction. In 1920 he moved into Rudall Crescent in Hampstead and began recording old buildings in the area. A couple of years afterwards, he began to travel widely, including to Italy. But Tangier got the better of him. The town is celebrated for its disorientating shifts of perspective as the streets and arches change direction on the steep hillside. Wood had a conventional view of place and as he began to travel in England and Wales, recording the old streets of Oxford, Cambridge, Norwich and Tenby he discovered a metier that led on to commissions to record towns like Stamford and Peterborough that were threatened with development. In 1937, he moved to Barnack a couple of miles outside Stamford.
So where did he come across colour woodcut? Going by the feel of his prints, my hunch is he got to know Kenneth Broad while serving in the Artists Rifles during the first war. Cadques is quite a lot like Broad's A Sussex Farm (1925). His street scenes were also close to the views Broad made of Croydon and Hastings in the thirties. Wood was less quirky than Broad and had a better sense of what made a picture The other ghost in the machine is Yoshijiro Urushibara. It is the very subtle way Wood played off shadow and the rich keyblock against shades of pink and ochre that reminds me of the 1919 Bruges portfolio Urushibara made with Brangwyn (immeadiately above). The conventional view should not distract from the elegance of the procedure, particularly his handling of early morning light and colour. As we looked down the street (below), we would be forgiven for thinking the tower towards the end belonged to the Palazzo Medici and that the distinguished town of Oxford has somehow morphed into the far more distinguished city of Florence. Wood took it even further when he gave Olde England (above) the definitive pinks, ochres and volcanic greys of Naples. Wood's travels told on him. Everywhere he went in England, it reminded him of somewhere else, not as nice as Hampstead probably, but more vigorous, more exciting, more youthful.
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