Since leaving university I have found my tastes have changed in many things, mostly in decor, some life choices; like shortly after leaving university I became a vegetarian (and still am).
Another thing that hasn’t changed is my love for Christopher Wool’s work. In Cambridge we were lucky enough to have a bizarre book shop called Galloway and Porter, it was fantastically cheap, mostly for paperback books but they had sections on everything. It was in there I bought a set of books on the painter and photographer Christopher Wool.
His artworks seam remarkably simple at first when viewed in a book, but only when you see them in real life you acknowledge the scale of some of the pieces. Many of the paintings are on white enamelled aluminium.
Wool is best known for his paintings of large, black, stencilled letters on white. Wool began to create word paintings in the late 1980s, reportedly after having seen graffiti on a brand new white truck of the words SEX LUV. Using a system of alliteration, with the words often broken up by a grid system, or with the vowels removed (as in ‘TRBL’ or ‘DRNK’), Wool’s word paintings often demand reading aloud to make sense.
Many of the paintings and prints use repeating patterns and motives. Such a patterned painting roller, spray paint and black blotches. When these are all merged together the parts fight for attention with areas of it erased and degraded, over stencilled and destroyed.
Wool was born in Boston to Glorye and Ira Wool, a molecular biologist and a psychiatrist. He grew up in Chicago. In 1973, he moved to New York City and enrolled in Studio School studies with Jack Tworkov and Harry Krame. After a short period of formal training as a painter at the New York Studio School, he dropped out and immersed himself in the world of underground film and music.
