Minor Works

Vermont-based artist Frank Woods grew up in Montreal and graduated from McGill University. He draws influence from his childhood home, evident in his skillful ‘en plein air’ landscapes from the Lower St Lawrence and Gaspe region where he now spends the summers.  His long relationship with drawing and painting started as a child in an afterschool art class and continued into adulthood with life drawing classes at the Boston Museum School.  When Woods moved to Vermont he became a long-time member of the Billy Brauer live model drawing and painting sessions where he further developed his unmistakably iconic style. Woods explores a range of subject matter in his bold and powerful work.

Artist Statement:

I have had a long relationship with drawing, from early childhood on into grown up life, without the benefit of art school instruction. Drawing is an end in itself, but it doesn’t stop there. I love the very act of drawing, but also the kind of problem solving it can bring to painting. It may be come a stage on the way to painting, useful in establishing composition and helping to simplify the proposed work. In landscape painting, drawing, in the form of thumbnail sketches, can serve the same purpose. Much of my landscape work has been in and around our place in Québec. My wife’s stepmother was a life-long painter and she started me on that path, taking me for sessions ‘en plein air’ in the Lower St Lawrence and the Gaspé region where we now spend our summers. 

I was born in Vancouver, BC, but grew up in Montréal. My earliest formal training in art and design came when I was in third grade, about eight years old, in an afterschool class. These were held at la Musée des Beaux Arts in downtown Montreal. I remember almost nothing of the experience. Nevertheless, I was on the way. In middle school I had real encouragement from Miss Jackson, the art teacher, and niece of a very famous Canadian painter. Much later, in Boston, while working at two Harvard libraries, I began evening life drawing classes on Tuesday and Thursday at the Boston Museum School. The class, taught by Bill Flynn, was so good I took it four years in a row. We moved to Vermont, Moscow then Montpelier, and I joined the Billy Brauer’s Thursday live model drawing and painting sessions. And then I started to paint. The rest, as they say, is best experienced by looking around.

– Frank Woods