Madeleine Wood: Wild Things

Realist painter Madeleine Wood brings us breathlessly close to the natural environment surrounding her Vancouver Island home, especially in her paintings of arbutus trees, with their peeling bark and their trunks thrusting upward into the clear blue sky. These trees, which grow only on the west coast of North America, are a personal favourite of the artist, she says in her statement, adding that the russet curls of their ex- foliating bark against the smooth green bark beneath “are found abstract paintings.”