Jonas Wood

Jonas Wood (born 1977) is a contemporary artist.

Raised in Boston, Wood is the child of "art-inclined parents". He graduated from the Cambridge School of Weston in 1995. As an undergraduate, he chose to study at a liberal arts school where he could study both science and art. By his junior year, he had completed his psychology major and he spent his senior year studying painting. Now, he is a Los Angeles-based artist who holds a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 1999 and a Masters of Fine Arts degree from University of Washington in 2002.

Wood paints from studies (collages and drawings) and sometimes uses photography, but most of his works and studies are part of the larger plan of creating paintings. Wood has also done etchings. Among Wood's motifs are domestic interiors, landscapes, still-life and sports scenes. In an Architectural Digest story by Rebecca Bates, Wood claimed to paint to create new memories of his former residences: "I'm interested in exploring the spaces that I’ve inhabited and the psychological impact they've had on me and my memories of them,...And then I can create a new memory of that space." The result is the perception that his work is very sincere.

Wood's genre is described as multidimensional. In T, he was described as working "With one foot in Modernist cool and the other in vibrant Pop Art". Similarly, Artspace describes his work as if he works "With one foot rooted in Analytic Cubism and the other in Contemporary Pop art". In The Huffington Post Woods is described in reminiscence of classic masters: "Although Wood pays homage to Van Gogh along with other abstract colorists like Matisse, Picasso and Keith Haring, his works are decidedly modern... Both steeped in tradition yet completely fresh, Wood captures the impossible sharpness of modernity with the familiar feelings of home." Roberta Smith of The New York Times notes that "his works negotiate an uneasy truce among the abstract, the representational, the photographic and the just plain weird."

Smith compares his work to those of Daniel Heidkamp. In another story about Wood, Smith noted that as a painter who paints his own life, his art bears similarity to Édouard Vuillard, Henri Matisse, Alex Katz and David Hockney.

He and artist Shio Kusaka are married. Shio Kusaka, born in Japan, creates distinctive porcelain, and Wood then photographs and paints the pieces for co-operative exhibitions. They co-author art books in a series with the pen name Wood Kusaka Studios.