Green grass

Tony Woods’ 'Green grass' is a pictorial and conceptual pun, painted to appear like the back of a stretched canvas. The image includes notations and a sketched portrait of Sydney artist Peter Kingston, as if started but abandoned for the canvas to be ‘reused’ on the other side.

Woods used the device of the trompe-l’oeil (an image intended to deceive the eye) in several of his works. This reflexive approach draws attention to the process and materials of painting. It also suggests a desire for authenticity which Woods pursued through the process of paring back, demonstrated in his repeated use of motifs like chairs, coat hangers and filtered light falling across stairs and surfaces.

Born in Hobart in 1940, Woods studied at the Hobart Technical College and by the mid-1960s had established an active exhibiting career. In 1968 he travelled on a Harkness Fellowship to New York where he lived at the Chelsea Hotel and took up connections introduced to him by critic Clement Greenberg, whom he had met in Australia in 1967. Forgoing figuration for abstraction, Woods’ two-year stay ended with a fire that destroyed his work and studio, precipitating a return to Australia.

Woods returned to figuration upon settling in Sydney. 'Green grass' captures the social aspect of Woods’ studio environment in which two figures are portrayed as if in conversation – a ‘behind the scenes’ moment befitting a back-of-canvas sketch. The Kingston figure appears again, identically posed and dressed, in Woods’ more traditional portrait 'Peter Kingston' 1972, while the obscured foreground figure and chair back echo the enigmatic painting 'Illusion begins' from 1968. In this way, the work offers an intertextual reference to Woods’ own oeuvre, perhaps a metaphysical reflection on the role of the artist at work.