Cherry Hood is best known in Australia for winning the Archibald Prize with her oversized watercolour portrait of Simon Tedeschi. Her work is represented in many important Australian art collections, including the BHP Billiton Collection, Art Gallery of NSW, National Gallery of Australia, Artbank, and many regional art galleries.
Hood has become well known for her haunting, large-scale images of young boy’s faces. In recent years she has added the female face to her repertoire, but adolescent boys, with androgynous features, still dominate each exhibition.
Hood want the viewer to be confronted by these faces, the huge scale, the eyes looking back at the viewer, the passive pose all add to the edgy difficult experience of viewing these works.
Hood starts by photographing her subject; some she knows, others she bumps into. From each series of 50 or so photographs a couple will inspire a painting. The resulting artwork takes on a new identity and is never a straight forward likeness or portrait.
She noted that she asks “the boys not to smile as I photograph them, and it’s amazing the range of facial expressions you get. I never paint smiling children. A smile fixes a meaning – it makes the painting look like a snap shot photograph, I want my work to be more complex than that, more demanding on the viewer.”
Hood paints these images using watercolour on canvas or paper. “I use canvas to get scale, I prefer paper it is far more beautiful and far more difficult but I can’t get scale which is an important aspect of the work.”
The dribbles and runs of the watercolours stain the canvas or paper with soft melting marks. Hood is interested in the juxtaposition of detail as in the eyes and facial features with the looseness of the rest of the painting. The long drips ad a sort of structure to the work and grid which holds the work together.
In recent years Hood has moved to the country to build her dream studio.’’ I am surrounded by incredible landscapes but am having great difficulty coming to grips with it in my work. I have introduced it as pattern in some backgrounds which is somewhat successful but I am still trying to use it as a narrative. My work has never told a story before as I always preferred to leave that to the audience, not that one has a choice in that, everyone bring something different to my work. Audiences are naturally passionate about faces but maybe they will be able to go with me in a landscape.”
Hood has travelled widely and has exhibited in San Francisco, New York, Vancouver, Zurich and Toronto, as well as across Australia. Her art career began after she graduated with a Masters of Visual Art from the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, in 2000. This was followed by her first solo exhibition in 2001 and winning the prestigious Archibald Prize for Portraiture in 2002. In 2003 she won the Kedumba Drawing Award and was a finalist in the Doug Moran Portrait Prize, the Dobell Drawing Prize, the Portia Geach Memorial Award, the Whyalla Art Prize, the Hutchins Work on Paper Prize and the Archibald Prize between 2004 and 2007.
Cherry is represented by Tim Olsen Gallery in Sydney, Arc One in Melbourne, Heiser Gallery in Brisbane and by Paul Greenaway in Adelaide.