Jonas Wood talks about his new print edition Bball Studio
'It's almost like a blueprint, or a skeletal part of my studio practice, but it's also a drawing'
"It wraps up all these things: Nostalgia for this old studio, this great painting that we used for the cover, and the original drawing changed back into a print - eight years later - to raise money for charity," says Jonas Wood of his new limited edition print Bball Studio (2019).
The etching, produced in-house by Jonas Wood's studio, is signed and numbered to 200, and comes with a hardcover copy of our Contemporary Artist Series book Jonas Wood, inside a silkscreened limited-edition tote bag.
Proceeds benefit Creative Growth, an Oakland-based non-profit that serves artists with developmental, intellectual, and physical disabilities. Here's a small clip from a much longer interview Jonas Wood gave Artspace.com about the new edition.
"This {print} is from the big studio I rented in 2007 after my first show in New York. That's the studio I had for ten years. I rented it from Ed Ruscha. This is where I started making my first floating basketballs. I got really obsessed with making drawings of isolated basketballs taken from images of basketball players in action. I began pinning them up on the wall and looking at them in grids and eventually I started making paintings of them.
"Everything kind of happened in that space. When I first got it, I didn't have anyone working for me. In that space, I went from a small studio painter to someone who works with a team of assistants. That's just one thing, in terms of process, that I could say happened in that studio over time.
"I started playing poker a lot in that studio, and I had a regularly hosted poker art game for the last ten years. I made a lot of shows in that space. I made a lot of good work in there. That's where my wife and I started sharing a big compound together. I think that's so cool. We kind of raised our kids there. During the first six years of their life, they spent a lot of time there. And they remember it.
"I was interested in using a painting of this first studio for the cover of the book. When we were thinking about what to do for the limited edition, I went back and found the original drawing I had used as a tracing to make the painting—the painting that eventually became the cover. It represented what I think this book is about: my process.
"I wanted to recreate the source image, and part of the vision for the project was to show how I get to where I get to. It starts out very simply. So that was kind of the point. It's almost like a blueprint, or a skeletal part of my studio practice, but it's also a drawing.
"Printmaking is a big part of my process, drawing is a big part of my process, and tracing and getting the basic shapes of things before I make the painting is a big part of my process. That's exactly what this etching is. I'm really, really happy with it. You get a lot of swag for your buck!"
