The Great Indoors

Painter Jonas Wood has always loved plants. As a child, he would spend hours in his parents’ and grandparents’ gardens in Boston, taking clippings of his favourite flowers. At college, he filled his room with potted ferns. And when he moved to California in 2003, when he was in his mid-twenties, greenery began to creep into his work.

“In grad school, I was painting based on Bacon and Picasso,” he says on a video call from his studio in Los Angeles, referring to the moody, and sometimes violent, works of Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso. “But I found myself moving from darkness to light when I moved to California. Coming from the East Coast to the West Coast, the climate is so different. There are so many cacti and succulents here—they’re almost prehistoric. I was just leaning into the things I was into.”

It paid off. Wood abandoned his earlier moody aesthetic in favour of the work he is famous for today—bright, colourful paintings that play with scale and perspective, turning complex shapes