by Elizabeth Rush
Ann Wood has had a long career in the arts. With her husband Dean Lucker she formed the Fine Art partnership of Woodlucker, selling and exhibiting their artwork in galleries and craft shows nationwide. Seeking the opportunity to move into a more personal direction, Ann was inspired by paper artwork that she saw on Instagram.
“I thought that this was really interesting and I had a huge flat file filled with paper. I thought I might as well give this a try. I first started making paper feathers and then insects and butterflies.”
Around the time she started to focus on botanical subjects she took a trip to the Natural History Museum in NY.
“I went with a very good friend of mine, who’s also a painter, and I was just blown away by the dioramas. Looking into those dioramas and seeing the plants, and just the idea of documenting what is in the world here that is surrounding us……it’s just so beautiful, so inspiring.”
Ann has always been an avid gardener, she forces bulbs during the long Minnesota winters and starts growing seedlings in her heated garage to be planted in the spring and summer. Her garden has become her inspiration for her art pieces, a resource for studying the growth and structure of the plants she would like to depict.
“My garden became my place to experiment, raising seeds of things I wanted to make eventually out of paper.”
Ann has depicted many of the important subjects of botanical artwork. Many of her pieces show the plant roots.
“I think the thing that is interesting to me about roots is their differences. If you’re not studying plants you might think that all roots are just masses that go down. …but some of them are fat…some super skinny…some are shallow or ball shaped underneath. In plant life there’s such a wide variety. I think they’re so beautiful. I’ve made a lot of bulbs, too, with their root systems. Beautiful.”
Like many botanical artists she has turned her focus on leaves and branches.
“I started doing fruit…then peach branches, apple branches, pear branches - a lot of spring blooming tree branches, too. I just find I get into a category. I think for me it’s about the categories of things and having a whole collection of botanicals that surround my area. I live in Minneapolis. We have enormous changes in the natural world here and I’m categorizing everything that’s around me.”
Ann’s milkweed seed pod is an example of her interest in the full trajectory of a plant’s life. Like many botanical artists she finds depicting the dried or dead plant fascinating.
“I like dead things, too, like dead plants. The bud, the flower, the dying flower and then the seed pod in the end….I think the milkweed is like that. I have yet to do a milkweed flower but it would be nice to have those two side by side. Growing up in Iowa, there were milkweed pods everywhere in the fall.”
Ann has become fascinated with mushrooms and the habitat that surrounds them.
“I love them because of their texture and the challenge of trying to find ways to use paper to make it look like the softness of a mushroom. This week I was working on one that incorporated paper and drier lint to get the right effect. I think the gills of the mushroom are much like flowers and that’s my favorite part to make.
“Mushrooms are very popular right now so they’re a perfect vehicle for social media in a lot of ways because people are fascinated by not only their form and variety but also the fact that they just suddenly appear out in the world. They're so ephemeral.They come up out of the ground and might be gone by the next day.”
“I absolutely love Zinnias. The last couple of years my summers have been focused on making Zinnias and Dahlias, both of which I have raised from seed. I scour Instagram grower pages to find seeds of varieties I haven’t made yet. …They’re my favorite thing to make. Color and form-wise with my paper, they’re really a good fit. And it’s a full circle: I start with the seeds in my light garden, raise the babies up and protect them from bunnies when they’re small and then four months down the road I’ve got these beautiful plants that are models for me to make in three dimensions.”
Explaining the complexity of creating her paper zinnia sculptures Ann says she starts with what she feels is the eye of the plant.
“As a painter I always painted the eyes of my figures first and then built the face and background out from the eyes. I feel that the center of the Zinnia in particular is like the eye of the plant. If I can get that right, then I know I can finish the plant nicely. Sometimes I can’t so that one goes into the junk drawer. But if I get that part right I know it’ll turn out.”
Like many artists, Ann has rituals that help her to focus on her creative tasks.
“I’m super tidy. When I come to the end of a project I photograph it and then I clean up my desk. My desk is totally clean, I vacuum the floor. I arrange my materials and my live plants around me so it’s super logical and organized. When I’ve completed the project, I photograph it and post it on Instagram.”
“I love Instagram. I love sharing and following a lot of the artists and creatives. It’s like my diary where I can see the progression through all these different stages throughout the years. I love seeing the work of others, it’s very inspiring to me. I see that people don’t make huge leaps creatively but make incremental steps toward a new direction. That interests me because I’m always trying to find a new path that will be interesting in this medium.”
To view more of Ann’s work, you can visit her Instagram page.
You can visit her website here.