If only for an instant, your mind is paralyzed by some fraction of the awe that explanation seeks to strip away. In Woodring's illustrations, everything seems suspended in that single, wavering moment of awe, forever inching toward an explanation that explains only itself. Pervading his work is an aura of possibility that is more threat than blessing. Shapeshifters wander with menace through Byzantine villages and Salvador Dali moonscapes, driven by indecipherable motives. Bizarre creatures spring up at random to devour, digest, and assimilate each other.
Colors explode, incandescing with psychotropic intensity.
Such constancy of change pitches a disconcerting challenge to perception. Comprehension is baffled. And yet, for all this shifting strangeness, there's a weird mechanical force governing the alternate realms Woodring depicts, a principle of cosmic puppetry. It's perhaps this vision of fate that makes Woodring's drawings so fascinating, and, at times, so disturbing. When I ask Woodring, over coffee at his University District residence, why he thinks someone might object so powerfully to his art, he seems genuinely baffled.