“The world will never lack wonders; what it lacks is wonder. We grow blind not because the light is dim, but we forget to look. The moment a man learns to marvel again, he steps back into the richness of reality.”
ARTIST’S BIO
John Woods is a Denver-based American still life painter working in oil and acrylic at a monumental scale.
His large-format paintings—works reaching up to seven feet—continue the tradition of American still life masters like Raphaelle Peale, William Harnett, and John Peto. Woods paints flowers in vintage American containers—coffee cans, Ball jars, vintage tins, soda bottles—applying the same obsessive optical precision the trompe-l'oeil masters brought to ordinary things.
Woods' understanding of museum-quality work was shaped during formative years assisting with one of the significant private collections of postwar American and contemporary art—a collection that contributed to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Harvard Art Museums. Working directly with pieces by Calder, Cornell, Close, Frankenthaler, de Kooning, Pollock, Kandinsky, and Thiebaud provided hands-on understanding of craft, scale, and institutional standards.
Woods has maintained a dedicated painting practice for four decades. His work is held in private collections across the United States, including families associated with major museum institutions such as the Denver Art Museum, as well as work formerly in the collection of Ginny Williams, one of contemporary art's most influential collectors and advocates.
Woods' work has been featured at the Coors Western Art Show and in publications including Southwest Art, Colorado Homes & Lifestyles, and Colorado Expression Magazine.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
American Still Life: Where My Work Fits
American still life painting established something distinct from the European tradition. Where European masters celebrated luxury goods—rare tulips, expensive imports, exotic fruits—American painters took a different approach. Raphaelle Peale painted cheese and strawberries. William Harnett and John Peto painted horseshoes, worn pipes, and old newspapers. Andy Warhol painted soup cans. Wayne Thiebaud painted cakes and deli cases. These artists applied museum-level craft to everyday vernacular objects. That democratic principle—that everyday things deserve serious attention—defines the American tradition.
I work in that lineage. My subjects are flowers in vintage American containers: Soda bottles, Mason jars, coffee cans, weathered fruit crates with branded labels. My compositions pair objects across decades of American manufacturing - a 1950s fruit crate with Depression-era glass, mid-century labels and soda bottles with freshly cut flowers - creating visual arguments about persistence, craft and looking closely at what we often overlook. My method is trompe-l'oeil optical realism—forensic attention to how glass refracts light, how stems distort through water, how vintage metal and paper weather over time.
What makes my work distinct is scale and compositional vision. These paintings can range from 40×30 inches up to seven feet tall, and that scale matters - dominating and transforming the space, forcing confrontation. I'm continuing the principle advanced by artists like Peale and Thiebaud while bringing my own eye to it: everyday objects deserve serious craft and sustained attention. This is what I’m after: paintings for serious collectors who still believe in the act of looking closely.
Why it matters now
We live in an era of visual saturation — images built for glances rather than sustained attention. This work is resistance, the obsessive optical precision isn’t decoration; it’s insistence that the physical world still rewards looking closely, that everyday objects still contain complexity worth sustained attention. These paintings ask collectors to participate in an act of cultural resistance: choosing to look in a world designed to make us scroll past.
John Woods
