ABOUT JON

Jonathan Charles Woods is originally from Royston, Cambridgeshire. The youngest of four, he has always had a keen desire to make sense of himself and how he relates to the world and to express himself through art.

Jon studied art at Brighton Art College and then spent several years in London, exhibiting solo at The Square Gallery in Highgate, before moving to the suburbs of Birmingham with the birth of his first child. This began a 40 year period in which he exhibited sporadically in group shows and continued to explore his inner landscape from the safety of the Art Womb. He pursued a postgrad certificate in Art and Design Education at Middlesex University as well as a Diploma in Art Psychotherapy at St Alban’s Art College, and he spent thirty years as an art therapist in the NHS before the service was wound down due to funding cuts.

Heavily influenced by the German Expressionists, Beckmann, Bacon, Rego, as well as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and the psychoanalysts, his early work features moody observational portraits in which he honed his technical skills and voice as an artist. He later developed a more figurative expressionist approach, heavy with symbolism and often featuring people from his life as he grew as a father, a professional, a husband and a human being. He frequently uses the motifs of his clinical art therapy practice in his own work as a means of processing his own experiences.

Jon has now retired to Penzance with his wife, Carol, and his beloved dogs. Here his style has taken on a bigger, bolder tone, and - despite the pressures of what he dubs “the Cornish Art Mafia” - he seems to have found the space not only to express himself at his fullest, but to finally bring those expressions to the world.