Swirl
By Thomas Woodward, Installed 1999
It was in the name all along. It just took Tom Woodward about forty years to recognize the significance of his name and his favorite past time.
Woodward might be the first to tell you, “Momma’s, don’t dismiss your little boy’s love of model airplanes and boats.” The fascination may not lie so much in the building of the vessel, but in a true fascination with the look and feel of wood. At least, for this artist, that is what he remembers.
A sculpture by Woodward must be critically viewed with more than artistic merit. For his work is an amalgamation of the visual lyrical forms of art. Like a violin, one wonders how that piece of wood can make such beautiful music. In Woodward’s sculptures one wonders how an artist can accomplish the graceful movement of a solid piece of wood, or a curvilinear thinness in a finite maple loop. From the standpoint of art, his designs are academically complex, but at a glance it’s love of wood and design that stand as essential elements in a Tom Woodward sculpture.
Categorically, it is abstract, yet due to the fact that it is so complex –looking as in geometric lingo, it may be pegged more as contemporary, non-figurative art. All a viewer can surmise is the design would not work if an ingenious mind were not at the helm of its creation.
