Nara Wood was born in northern California in 1976. Her childhood was spent on a small remote island in the Lau group of Fiji. There, she received a comprehensive and unconventional education, focusing on the cultural and religious history of the world in addition to her regular curriculum. Since then, Nara has spent her time residing as close as possible to water—in California, New York, and Hawaii—and this movement toward the horizon, in the presence of water, is visible in many of her paintings.

Nara has spent the last 15 years in the self-guided study and practice of art, with painting as her constant focus. The spontaneity and vigor of her aesthetic passion has led her to explore mediums from web and magazine design, to theatrical make-up and set design, to oil and watercolor painting. She has attended several art classes at Santa Rosa Junior and Yuba Colleges. Her former tutors include sculptor Peter Lennon, miniaturist Linda Oppenheimer, and painter Lydia DePole—who first introduced her to watercolor. In 1996 she began a two-year study in art conservation, caring for and cataloguing a large private collection of East Indian, Oriental, and Disney art.

While attending high school in northern California, Nara chronicled the story of her grandparents’ incarceration in the Japanese internment camps of World War II and an interest in her Japanese-American heritage grew suddenly and naturally from that. She studied the great masters of Oriental painting, gaining an understanding of traditional brushwork and the approach to space and line. Her artistry became clarified in the Japanese aesthetic with sumi ink and watercolor as her medium.

Nara studied for three years under Sensei Shuko Kobayashi in the Sogetsu school of ikebana beginning in 1997. Sculptural forms in the arrangement of flowers began to translate into the play of spatial relationships and positive and negative space in her paintings. This symbiosis continues today in a current series of ikebana still-life watercolors.

Since 2000, Nara has painted watercolor and ink landscapes on silk. She has recently been focused on a series depicting views that explore the presence and path of water. Jeff Polson, master goldsmith and woodworker collaborates with her, framing the pieces in exotic hardwoods accented with sterling silver hardware.

In the last two years, she has taken part in a number of shows and charitable auctions at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts in her present hometown of Sebastopol, California. Last summer her work was shown at the “Giri: Giving Back…Going Forward” exhibit at the Gualala Arts Center in Gualala, California, a celebration of contributions to Japanese-American arts and culture. In October her work was in the Marin Society of Artists national exhibition at the Marin Art and Garden Center in Ross, California.

Her watercolors are currently on display at the Far West gallery in Graton, California.

© 2007 Nara Wood. All rights reserved.