An interview with Thomas Woodruff
Friday, 30 December 2011 00:09
Written by Kirsten Anderson

Painter Thomas Woodruff's powerful, lushly dark and decadent paintings are full of macabre wonders,strange allegories that weave the troubling effects our current culture inflicts upon us with a sense of
fantastical majesty in an opulent swirl of visual alchemy. These intense and intricate narratives call tomind both the symbolic botanical grandiosities of 16th Century Dutch and Flemish painters, to 20thCentury Fantastic Realism. His work is reined in from becoming too self important by the slightest touchof cartoon-ishness, with glimpses of modern life interjected within surrealistic narratives, such as tattoo
and body modification imagery, or the use of contemporary couture/subculture costumery.
For example, “Choleric (Landscape variation)” has a waft of epic fantasy worthy of Frank Frazetta, withits be-goggled heroine in the grip of a supernatural tiger, but the sheer abundance and symbolism stops
it just short of teetering into purely sci fi illustration. It’s hard to absolutely pigeonhole Woodruff into
any distinct style or movement, (although he refers to himself as a “neo-fabulist”) which is a complimentto his well-acknowledged visual prowess as an image-make.
His latest series, “The Four Temperament Variations” is an exploration of the ancient notion that man
was ruled by four humors (or fluids) within the body that should be identified and manipulated in orderto achieve a sound mind and body. These humors were identified with different bodily fluids and eachone had its distinct characteristics…the Melancholic (black bile), Sanguinic (blood), Phlegmatic (phlegm)
and Choleric (yellow bile). Woodruff has created a series of paintings touching on each theme within thelarger series, using a set of animals, plants, and narratives to explore each idea several times in order tocreate “structures of contemplation”.
I hit up Thomas for a brief interview for Hi Fructose on the eve of his upcoming show at New York’s
PPOW Gallery, opening on January 5th. - Kirsten Anderson
Your work seems to deal with the "mundane" in a very mystical way. In fact, much of your work has aprofoundly mystical air...what inspired you to take that route in your work-who were yourinspirations? In this series, your emphasis is on the 4 “humors”. What prompted you to explore thatas a theme for this new series of works?
Images come to me and I draw them in notebooks and scraps of paper. I then let them simmer in mymind for months or years. If they still have a slippery resonance, I’ll paint them. What I mean by that isthat can’t seem completely readable, the drama has to have both mystery and plausibility…and a sincere
sense of humanity. The theme helps me to edit ideas. The four temperaments had always seemed likepotent material for me, I first saw the Balanchine ballet on the subject when I was in college, and I’ve
been interested in forgotten or failed scientific theory for a long time. They are an exploration of color

(red, yellow, black, and white), the elements (blood/air, fire, earth, water) and in my research they
seemed to be associated with age (sanguinic/youth, choleric/adult, melancholic/middle age, andphlegmatic/old age) as well as the emotional traits they define. As I get older, I try to keep theseemotions in better balance, and these paintings allowed me to examine my own temperament during
their creation.
I love imagistic painting of all stripes, and use just about anything I come across that will work as
inspiration. In this series, clearly the Symbolists are of interest, as well as medieval tapestries, Rubens,Pontormo, Delacroix, Rousseau, Blake, the Tonalists, the list goes on… I worked with Robert Wilson, theartist and theatre director, when I was in my twenties and his sense of the carefully orchestrated dreamhas always resonated with me, particularly with these pageant-like works.
I find it interesting that each theme (humor) has its own miniseries, from a smaller image thatfunctions as a sort of “detail” (although a completely separate painting in its own right) up to themore epic, narrative painting. What was the thought behind this?
The first paintings I made were the still life (flower) variations. They are fairly large and complicated, andit took me about a year to finish them. I roughed out the large paintings and was a bit intimidated tocomplete them after they were begun. I started to do studies of the beasts, so I could get somepaintings completed to build my confidence; this led to doing “batterfly” and “tiger” wildlife variations. I
then set to work to complete the large landscape variations, then the male portraits, and the dolphinvariation came last, in a burst-- all of the sea monsters in one canvas!
You have used the term “neo-fabulist” to describe yourself as an artist, and you clearly make newimages that seem to have come from somewhere else, as if pulling previously unseen things downfrom the archetypal subconscious. Would you agree with that? Or are you consciously creating yourown vocabulary of creatures and stories to create “fables” of contemporary issues?
I think the term “neo-fabulist” is hilarious yet apt, and a serious term for the way I approach painting. I
am a relentless “cross-referencer”, so I am fluent in the vocabularies of narrative picture making, but I
also love formal structure. In this series, the still life, portrait and landscape variations gave me anarchitecture on which to build my characters and narratives. I researched other artists and theirapproach to the material, but I tried to come up with my own eccentric images to convey myrelationship with the content, however, often strange things happen: after completing the landscapepaintings, I found old engravings using very similar characters and compositions to mine, complete withowls in the melancholic, and turtles in the phlegmatic. The same thing has happened before, whenworking with alchemical imagery, and it freaks me out a little bit when I do tap into the image bank ofour collected visual history. The process seems like a very natural, straightforward ride when it’shappening, it’s only when you attempt to describe later do things seem supernatural or mystical.
Your paintings always seem to have an abundance of ornamentation. I was curious about thisdepiction of such opulence- what inspires you to paint so lushly?
I make the paintings for me. I’m like a kid in the basement putting on the puppet show, and would

rather not invite my parents down. I love paintings that are complicated and ingenious in construction,
filled with bravura flourishes, and then burn their crazy pictorial logic into the brain! I think modernism
was puritanical in its withholding of pleasure, and has turned many people away from the joy of looking
at art. I feel that the lack of ornament is like a lack of adjectives in literature, or a lack of seasoning incooking…its rough going. But it must be done with balance, I am not afraid to use design andornamentation if it will service the overall image. There is something magical in taking these very
humble materials and being able to make them into shimmering tableaus, I’ve worked for many years to
be capable of such excess and make it look easy. Hopefully, it’s not overworked, the paintings in person
are quite simply painted in blobs and dashes, and the brush does most of the work.
Your paintings are sometimes startling in that they often look done in an earlier era, but there will be
an unexpected modern twist, such as body modification imagery, or a piece of fashion that seems outof another time. This sometimes lend a science fiction/fantasy component to the work, I waswondering what you thought about this mixing of “lowbrow” (i.e. pop culture/fantasy reference) and“highbrow” (i.e. masterfully painted symbolism)
I am a Chair at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and so I see what younger people are obsessed
with: Fantasy images, Steam punk images, Animae/asian inspired images, and body modification allthings in our current zeitgeist, and they are all things that have been of interest to me for many years (Iwas getting tattooed in the early 80’s, and have used Victorian imagery even before that). My attraction
to all of these things was the emotional potential in these overused, impotent images, and I am
fascinated to see if there is power left in them.

This is why I like the term “neo-fabulist,” as the highbrow/lowbrow distinctions are troubling to me. It
almost seems that the “lowbrow” moniker gives certain artists an excuse to have their work beconceptually inane, and a lot of it is. I am far from being a lowbrow fellow; I pride myself on being
culturally well educated, and can pull inspiration from whatever sources interest me at a given
moment—be it grand opera or a watermelon sculpture. Great filmmakers, fashion designers, composers
and writers can blend historical and popular cultural themes more freely in their work without beinglabeled. To me, these paintings could not me made at any other time than now. I could not have madethem any earlier in my oeuvre, and to me they reflect our time. When I was creating these works, somestudio visitors referred to a shared sensibility with Alexander McQueen, and in certain ways we havecertain things in common: a love of color and shape, unexpected content, resuscitating fusty tropes, anda certain foolhardy fearlessness.
I’m pretty curious about the batterflies! How did they originate?
To tell you the truth, it was a pretty thrilling moment. In the melancholic image, I wanted to have awoman with a dress with a long train that turned into her dark thoughts that she must carry behind
her—a pretty classic melancholic conceit. The original drawings were too Goya-esque, and looked too
melodramatic with bats and owls…and it suddenly occurred to me to create the “batterfly”, and it all
made sense. They could be caring and protective, sinister yet comic, beautiful and horrible all at thesame time. The butterfly shape is so appealing while the bat is so scary…I was so happy I came up withthe right solution to the problem, and I’m not sure where it came from!