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, exploring and experimenting with his sexuality and desire, before moving to the suburbs of Birmingham with the birth of his first child. This began a 40 year period in which he exhibited only sporadically in group shows, with his self-expression curtailed and censored; and continued to explore his inner landscape, queerness, and relationship with self, family and society 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. This growth was inspired by radical artists like Gilbert & George, blurring the boundaries of art and life. He frequently used 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 to what outwardly appears a heteronormative life with his wife, Carol, and his beloved dogs. Here his style has taken on a bigger, bolder tone. Despite the pressures of what he dubs “the Cornish Art Mafia” to tone things down he seems to have found the space to express himself at his fullest -embracing both his queer non-normative self, and reflecting on his heterosexual family life - and to finally bring those expressions to the world.

“ a life lived across categories, but never reducible to a single label. Only as a truthful expression of self, desire, and human connection.” - Jon C Woods