Irene Wood is an American born, half Chinese multimedia artist based in Seattle, WA. In her paintings, the landscape becomes both a mirror and a cipher—an abstract terrain through which time, memory, and cultural duality intersect. Influenced by the meditative spirit and spatial sensibility of ancient Chinese brush paintings, these canvases offer not depiction but distillation. What may first appear as abstract patterning reveals itself as a layered language of topography and psyche where the micro meets the macro in a quiet yet insistent dialogue. These forms resist mapping in any traditional sense in an effort to convey the autonomy of lived experience. There is a deliberate dissonance at play: between the ancient and the contemporary, the remembered and the imagined, the inherited and the self-forged. The artist paints with the freedom of abstraction but anchors it in the philosophical rigor of traditional Chinese aesthetics—echoes of shan shui (mountain-water) compositions coincide in the rhythmic undulations of color and void. Ultimately, these landscapes are not just external—they are internal geographies that invite the viewer to lose orientation and, in doing so, discover the subtle terrain of identity itself: fragmented, fluid, and defiantly whole.
Pricing inquiries, commissions, collaborations, galleries, don’t hesitate to leave your information here or email directly at irene@irenewood.com
Drought 36" x 48" on canvas Contact for pricing
Tephra 30" x 40" on canvas Contact for pricing
The Garden 18" x 24" on canvas - SOLD
Last Night 30"x40" on canvas - SOLD
Jungle 18" x 24" on canvas - SOLD
24"x36" on canvas Contact for pricing
Electric Fields 16" x 20" canvas mounted in a custom maple frame Contact for pricing
Era's End 30"x60" on canvas Contact for pricing
Infinity 18" x 24" canvas mounted in a custom maple frame Contact for pricing
Where the Land Meets the Sea 36" x 48" on canvas Contact for pricing
Above Below 30" x 40" on canvas Contact for pricing
KITCHEN TABLE SERIES
Inspired by Joy Harjo’s poem Perhaps the World Ends Here, this series is a meditation on the quiet omnipresence of the kitchen table. In Harjo’s words, the table is where “we laugh, cry, argue, pray, give birth, bury our dead.” It is mundane here, yet somehow simultaneously grand. This series reimagines the table as sacred ground—a space of inheritance, ritual, and everyday tenderness - where life’s joys, conflicts, and farewells unfold. It asks: What do we pass on here? Who is missing? Who is still present? And what remains, even when the plates are cleared.
This is just the beginning. The series continues with you and your table. Contact me here to start the conversation about your own table – how can we memorialize the unseen history of what this space has held, the future of what it will hold. Are there items that make it special: maybe it’s inherited linens you’d like to include in your painting, or the stack of mail that piles up because it’s that season of life. You can tell your story and I will paint it.
Irene
