Jeff Woodbury – Learning from Making Art: Insights from Jeff Woodbury’s Practice

I don’t have a signature style. My journey as an artist has been to explore the world, particularly, its systems, rhythms, and patterns, and to ask myself questions. I often start a series of works by asking myself, “What if?” and then set out to figure out how to answer that, with varying degrees of success. This is my happy place.

I’ve carried a notebook with me since the early 1980s. It’s my extrasomatic memory bank, my idea incubator—a place where ideas accumulate over time, unfiltered and unjudged. This cumulative exploration may spark new ideas years later, as ideas become layered over time.

I work concurrently on projects in a variety of media. I don’t wall off my practices; I have built an environment around myself which is conducive to doing anything, anytime.

Some projects take longer than others, some are explorations with no outcome intended. Often, ideas cross-pollinate and evolve into other projects. Sometimes an idea is set down for years, then picked up again and turned around and tested in a new position in the pattern of my work. The holes left by abandoned ideas are part of the pattern, too.

I choose materials to express my thoughts, and the materials in turn suggest more ideas—it’s a reciprocal exchange between making and thinking. My art lives not just in the final product, but in its making, and in its relation to other work. Making art is more than craftsmanship—it’s a journey of discovery and a deeply generative learning process. Learning in art isn’t top-down; instead, it emerges from the dialogue between artist and medium.

By the time I was eighteen, I had lived in sixteen different homes. When I moved to Los Angeles for art school, I drove straight to the beach, where I drew a spiral in the sand with a stick, as if to say, “I am here, now.”

In LA, I met the artist Michael Brewster, who created sculptures with pure sound. This was a profound moment in my art awakening. Sound waves created 3-D environments that you experienced by walking through the space. Rethinking what sculpture could be made me reconsider the ways I had thought about art. What was “necessary and sufficient?” A painting, for example, needs paint and something to paint on. But what if I painted on a shower curtain and then peeled off the dried paint? I realized that a painting requires only paint, and the boundaries between categories softened. This mindset is an undercurrent through all my work. Dissolving barriers unlocked the ability for me to think in wide-ranging methods, materials, and meanings.

It was a short step for me from carving lines in the sand with a stick to carving roadways out of highway maps, as I do in my “dissected maps” works. My father was a mapmaker and I’d always been entranced by them. By cutting away everything but the roads, a map ceases to be a two-dimensional representation of reality and becomes an actual three-dimensional thing.

As I dissected maps, I realized that the cut marks in the underlying matboard created a record of my actions. I began to cut maps on top of printmaking plates and make intaglio prints from those marks, leading me to ponder the ways we create and store information, and how it can mutate through reproduction. It reminded me of earlier works I’d done on photocopier machines—making copies of copies of copies of images, and then drawing the resulting marks.

To store my dissected maps, I carefully refold them. Seeing the information layered and hidden, I decided to make a black wax rubbing of a folded map, which created a drawing like an X-ray that revealed the underlying layers. I posterized this image into layers of increasing contrast and screen-printed, six layers of translucent white ink to capture this idea.

Around this time, I was living in Brooklyn and smoking in my apartment stairwell. One day, I started burning holes in coffee  filters and stacking layers of them. This led me to consider fire as a drawing tool.

I’d been tracing routes with a knife. I began to ask friends to lie down on large sheets of paper and trace their own outlines with a pencil taped to a stick. Then I would cut out these figures, roll them up, and soak them in a trough of paint thinner. I unrolled these figures onto seven-foot-long sheets of paper in my studio and set them on fire. Burning destroys the original figure and creates a new form. I was no longer drawing, but creating the situation for them to draw themselves. Beyond a certain point, I lose control and have to let the process play out.

The ashes that form as the flames subside take on fascinating qualities of their own. Rings of glowing orange slowly surround and engulf the remaining blackness, until all is still and quiet and incredibly delicate. I save all the ashes from each drawing—somehow, I feel it’s disrespectful to simply dispose of them, as they’re an integral part of the work.

Since I also save all the cutout pieces from my maps as they’re dissected, I decided to burn the pieces from a map, one at a time, on top of a sheet of paper. This created matching ashes, which I pressed against a second sheet of paper. I collected all the unburned pieces and collaged them on yet another sheet. Each step took up less space, until finally only a small pile of soot, the entropic end, remained.

It wasn’t until it came time to first hang this work that I decided to hang each element flush to the bottom, even with the others. The entire work appears like a sort of bar chart, reminiscent of its aesthetic-logical method of deconstruction.

All this time I continued to draw. I set about tracing the roads on every page of a road atlas  on translucent vellum, so that when I finished, I had an atlas of maps that were no longer maps. Placed on a light box, Atlas transforms from a book of drawings into a dense sculpture of lines fading into the abyss.

Traveling to Montréal, I made a drawing of the subway map with flexible paint to make a map I could carry in my pocket to find my way around. Years later, I revisited this idea and traced a full-size wall map of the United States with heavy-bodied acrylic paint drawn with a ceramic extruder. I’ve driven a great many of those highways. I marked each major city with dollar coins and titled it, Time Is Money. Drawing with extruded paint blurred the boundaries between drawing, painting, and sculpture.

Now, I was drawing with pencils and fire and knives and paint, making intaglio and screen prints, and blurring lines between drawing and performance and sculpture. Since I had the studio cleared out to burn large figures, one day I laid down on a large sheet of black paper, covered myself, and had a friend spray me with bleach. I presented this in a gallery with walls that stopped short of the floor. I filled that gap with a mirror and poured sand onto the floor, then attempted to recreate the sand spirals of my youth. I called this work Double Negative.

Working with the mirror triggered further explorations of mirrored work in my drawings, leading to my Manic and Machinespine works. Working with bleach led to my Splace and Waterfall drawings with bleach on black paper, as well as a drawing of the World Trade Center in the days after 9/11, using newspapers from that day to mask out the shapes of the twin towers.

In the early 2000s artists still had to make slides of their work to show to galleries, and in every box of slides you had developed, there’d always be two or three unexposed slides. I began to carefully heat these black slides over a candle flame in a series I called Firelite. Images were born, glowing in a vast space, on what is in reality a very thin, flat surface. Enlarging them brought out fractals, bubbles, and colors. Displaying them in lightboxes returned them to the state of transparencies, and taking slides of them completed the circle, becoming exact duplicates of the originals.

This is just a snapshot of the work I’ve created. Throughout flows a willingness to experiment and fail, as I let the process lead me towards new discoveries. This openness is where learning thrives. Keep a sketchbook and draw every day. Use your materials as conversation starters, not just tools. Return to old ideas—they’re fertile ground. And stay curious and playful—it makes for a rich life.

 

Image at top: Jeff Woodbury, Beach Spiral, sand drawing (Huntington Beach), dimensions variable, 1978.