Clare Woods: As I Please

Clare Woods: As I Please showcases the work of Clare Woods RA (b.1972), one of the most sought-after painters working in Britain today. Her highly colouristic paintings hover between abstraction and representation, expressing both a poetic romanticism and an unnerving psychic charge.

Woods' distinctive style is informed by her background in sculpture. She uses large, bold, and gestural brushstrokes of thick, fluid paint to create still-life and figurative paintings. These paintings are usually based on photographs of real objects and people, but are enlarged, cropped, and distorted almost to the point of illegibility. Much of her recent work explores the fine line between mortality, fragility, sickness, and health, while simultaneously creating a psychological space shared by both artist and viewer.

This book follows her previous monograph, Strange Meetings, published by Art / Books in 2016. It includes all the artist's most important paintings from the past decade, alongside the many prints and collages that have emerged from her painting practice in recent years.

Critic and art historian Charlotte Mullins provides a lively and accessible introduction to Woods' work, while psychoanalyst Darian Leader examines the psychological charge of its defamiliarising and estranging effects. Commentaries from Woods herself throughout the book offer her own insights into the meaning of individual works.