Around Among Within. Solo exhibition in London, January 2015 at Lacey Contemporary Gallery.

I am busy preparing to kick off 2015 with my first solo show at Lacey Contemporary Gallery in London. AROUND, AMONG, WITHIN Solo Exhibition by Laurence Wood 14 – 24 January 2015 Private View: Wednesday 14 January 2015, 6pm-9pm Contemporary British artist, Laurence Wood presents his first Solo exhibition at Lacey Contemporary in an exhibition of paintings influenced by the artists time living, working and travelling in South East Asia. This collection of paintings are to be enjoyed as visual poetry, with layers of thought – producing shape, colour, gesture, structure and imagery, condensed and collated, organised and played out on the canvas. The paintings have emerged with what is for me a new level of formal simplification, cryptic content, and increased focus on the expressive potential of colour. Initiated by facets of the place I live and work in, or by a personal experience, or perhaps an engaging contemporary issue or theme, once a painting is underway I allow related ideas and influences, and emotional responses, to join the play. The painting becomes a repository of reflections, a construction of layers. Some works clearly display the process of their own manufacture as you can see the stops and starts, passages of underpainting or overpainting, the initial impulse and the final correction or addition as background, foreground, object and subject, interact and shift position. My painting process is about resolving these often competing components in a fruitful way. The paintings form, content and subject can evolve and change dramatically, or can progress in planned steps. Titles of each work come and go during the making, but at some point the journey, the exploration, is paused, a title is determined and the making of the painting is complete.