Sunday, August 06, 2006

By Lynn Mitges, The Province, Vancouver BC


Next time you go to a movie and take a look at what's behind the scene, you might see something that hits close to home.

In Clerks II, which is playing now in theatres, the oil paintings in the background of the restaurant named Movies are those of Chilliwack artist Chris Woods.

His paintings have appeared on the covers of Adbusters, Saturday Night and Harper's magazines. He's an influential painter who's been targeted as one of the Top 100 Canadians to watch by Maclean's magazine -- and the Globe & Mail dubbed him the Leonardo of Logos.

For the 36-year-old Valley guy, it's all pretty cool but he still heads to his studio every day and puts in a full shift of painting.

"I try not to talk about it too much because people, frankly, don't spend much time looking at sets and design," he says of the latest attention in Clerks II.

Woods' paintings, "Houdini" and "Behold the King," were used because of their pop-culture theme and he says he was excited when he first heard from the movie's production designer.

"I always sort of hedged my bets. Knowing people in the film business, I know that things often get changed quite a lot and people change their minds -- but I was very happy to see that my paintings made the cut."

The logos that appear in the original paintings were changed to use the name Movies, but Woods says he never gave it a second thought.

"It never occurred to me until [agent] Diane Farris pointed it out that it was big of me to allow that and I thought: Why on Earth would I not want to?" he says.

"It didn't alter the integrity of the works. It just sort of switched a few little details here and there. It didn't bother me in the slightest."

Woods is the kid you knew in elementary school -- the one who could draw. He knew early on that this is what he'd be doing for a day job and after help from Chilliwack Senior Secondary art teachers and inspiration from his older sister, he set his course.

"Frankly, I was too much of a coward to go to Emily Carr, so I did two years at my local community college to enhance my skills a little bit." One of his instructors gained entry in open submissions for Woods in Artopolis '90.

"And darned if I didn't get accepted for one of 50 slots out of 500," he says. "I'm still surprised when I talk about it."

Being able to paint people was what Woods knew he needed to do to master his art. So he studied and practised.

"I enjoyed drawing people so much I started to paint people around me and, when you paint your friends when you're 19 or 20, you go to the mall, hang out at the McDonald's -- it all sort of happened naturally."

One sub plot to what Woods does is to chronicle the lives of people he knows.

"You'll see the friends I have now who have appeared in some of the very first works I did. Hairstyles change, or hair is falling out -- girlfriends come and go," he says. "It's not something I try to emphasize. I just hope to let it come in naturally."

One look at Woods' work shows his fascination with advertising -- and a thing for billboards.

"I have a keen interest in advertising in situ. I have a real weird fascination with those sorts of things, just driving around and looking at advertising and how it shows up at all those places. It really gets my imagination going, as well as seeing the people," he says.

Woods now is working on the second half of an exhibit titled Magic Hour, which debuts at the Diane Farris Gallery in the spring of 2007. The show looks at how cars and people are seen in car ads. For example, an ad might show a rolling landscape, a wide-open lane and clear skies while the real world is an ugly snarl of cars at the Port Mann Bridge.

"It's the disconnect between fantasy and reality," he says, which isn't without its own challenges.

Woods says the paintings are almost double the work because the design details have to be exact. Each painting takes from three to five months to complete in painstaking detail. And Woods' favourite size of canvas -- 7.5 feet tall by 5 feet deep -- is large-scale.

Woods says people mention that his works should be smaller to accommodate society's small-scale tastes.

"I think people are used to paintings being small and that you can just tack them up on the wall," he says. "The notion of it being oversized messes with their minds in a certain way."

© The Vancouver Province 2006