Clare Woods is a British painter who began her career as a sculptor. She primarily paints abstracted landscapes, but humans also feature in her more recent works.

I am not a fan of these current works, (that brand of abstraction is a bit boring and I feel they lack interesting compositions or cohesion), but her landscapes from a few years ago are stunning amalgamations of shape and color with an inspiring economical abstraction of light and form.

Bleeding Cross, 2008

From the whimsy of some of her works, one would hardly guess that Woods works from photographic imagery. She photographed these scenes of undergrowth at night, where the flash of her camera would create harsh lighting effects. This means that her shapes are simultaneously quite specific yet hard to interpret due to their low key. It's an interesting type of abstraction mostly because of Woods' imaginative additions; her bright selective colors and the mixture of flat shapes with rendered ones creates a beautifully complex image.

Black Vomit, 2008.

Woods also creates wonderfully deep and immersive spaces in her painting by pushing back into the negative space with ribbon-like lines. The twisting silhouettes of vines, branches, and leaves speak to the inherent chaotic nature of her subject. And while the images are reportedly supposed to reflect anxiety, I find additions like these more beautiful and fantasy-like.

Cold Garden, 2008