Artist and musician Issy Wood: ‘You can tell how happy someone is from their teeth’

Not everyone likes Issy Wood’s paintings. Her brother, says the 29-year-old artist, recently asked her not to give him any more work. “He said he’d rather have a computer game,” she tells me, when we meet at her London studio. The space is large and top-lit, filled with shelves of shiny tchotchkes and stacked with copious completed canvases; there is a small jungle of plants and a couple of sofas. I find a spot on one of these, while Wood opts to sit at a significant social distance opposite me, on an office chair in the middle of the room, rolling an occasional skinny cigarette.

She is still post-pandemic. “I didn’t feel anyone’s breath, or touch, for months. I hope I’m not permanently damaged,” she says.

Even if her brother isn’t keen, Wood’s work has been rapturously received elsewhere. Her paintings, from small and pocketable to a mighty two-metre-high and made on velvet, are unsettling and sometimes unfathomable. Accretions of objects — dinner services, shoes, china rabbits, false nails — elide with close-ups of puffa jackets, art-historical nudes, medieval armour, ancient statuary. The colours are muted, dark and drained. “Not everything has to be brightly coloured to work,” says Wood. “Goya taught me how to use black properly. Courbet taught me about flesh, and clothing.”

Images are gleaned from the internet or auction catalogues or painted from still life (those tchotchkes) and together build the world, both real and imaginary, that Wood inhabits. The paintings are not a diary (that occurs in her blogs) but an evocation of her contemporary female life, with its layers of pain and realms of influences, that often hovers around the surreal.

Shortly after our meeting, Wood will head to New York for a show of new work at the Michael Werner gallery on the Upper East Side. Larry Gagosian had made a bid to represent her in the US and, according to her blog, Queen Baby, ranted at her when she turned him down. Werner, she says, “seemed like an uncool move”, though one that would place her alongside a panoply of painters. The gallery, now under the direction of Gordon VeneKlasen, specialises in painting — Peter Doig, Per Kirkeby — though rarely in women artists.

Around 28 canvases have already been dispatched to Manhattan. One shows a car seat, a frequent subject that seems to suggest a sinister, un-grown-up aspect of masculinity. “It’s a Porsche interior. It looks like it was designed by Bridget Riley,” says Wood of its Op-art chequered textile. Another is of teeth, also a go-to, in a gaping, red-lipped mouth. “They are a diagnostic tool. You can tell how happy someone is from their teeth — if they grind them, if they’ve been damaged by acid erosion,” she says. Wood herself has long had eating disorders and her own bulimia has left its traces in her mouth.

Wood happened to be born in the US, to British parents — both medical professionals — who quickly returned to England. She studied fine art at Goldsmiths and the Royal Academy Schools in London and, by 2016, while still at the RA, she was spotted by Vanessa Carlos of Carlos/Ishikawa, a London gallery skilled at nurturing emerging artists. “It was good to start out with a young woman like Vanessa looking out for me,” says Wood. “The women rule in my family on both sides — through sheer force on my paternal side and soft power on my mother’s. The subtle eye roll.”

Wood’s ascent, under Carlos’s careful stewardship, has been remarkably fast. Last year, a two-metre trompe l’oeil of a glossy black and soft green puffa jacket made in 2018, called “Over Armour”, sold at Christie’s in New York for $479,000, and her record was set at Sotheby’s with “Study for goes both ways”, showing those car seats again, for $504,000.

Wood tells me she believes in the 10,000-hour rule of prolonged practice, and her increasing aptitude is right there in her work. She is not just a painter, but a musician and a sharp and fluent writer. “A triple threat,” says Sarah McCrory, the director of the Centre of Contemporary Arts at Goldsmith’s, who put on a Wood exhibition in 2019. “She’s inexhaustible, incredibly prolific. When we took all the paintings out of her studio for the show, I felt like her immediate drive was to fill it up again.”

Painting apart, Wood says writing and transcendental meditation “are what keep me afloat”. She meditates every day before breakfast, then works herself to the bone in the studio, particularly when she paints on richly coloured velvet, which is a tough thing to do. “I started that at the RA, when I was going through one of those insecure phases, worrying that painting on canvas was just boring,” she says. Now — however difficult — it defines her practice. “You can’t use anything wet, or any solvent, so I ruin brushes and it hurts my arm.”

The results are moody and dense — there is no reflection on the surface — and possibly with some conservation issues going forwards. “The ones who are most horny for my velvet paintings are the more mercenary types,” she notes. “The ones most likely to put them back into auction. So let’s see how that ends up.”

In the evenings she makes music at her kitchen table. The latest output, an album called My Body Your Choice, came out in August, following three EPs and a couple of singles. The music has an intentionally underpowered quality: tracks include “I just called to say I hate you”. In 2019, she started working with producer Mark Ronson — he lent her a Roland synthesiser and gave her a LinnDrum. “No one had heard my stuff and he made me feel good about making it,” she says. She signed to his label Zelig in November 2019, but in January 2020 the two parted company. Wood, who refuses to record anywhere other than her kitchen, saw Ronson add extra instruments into her work and cut the occasional verse. “It turned it from a hobby into something else, and it wasn’t the right move,” she says now.

This year, Lena Dunham directed a video for Wood’s single “Both”, with the actress Hari Nef standing in for Wood. “It’s hard to hand over control,” says Wood, “but I’d trust Lena’s eye on anything.” She had been a huge fan of Dunham’s TV series Girls — “I loved the characters, all deeply flawed and all horrible.” The video, like the music, is spare and minimal. Wood went to Dunham’s wedding in September 2021 in London, where she was praised for her painting by Taylor Swift. “I didn’t dare tell her I make music too.”

It’s not hard to imagine Wood, with her trendy mullety hair and long-limbed insouciance, taking to the stage. And yet she refuses to be photographed for this article, another legacy of her dysmorphia. What if someone takes her picture? “I’ll be performing,” she says. “I’ll be doing something. I won’t be posing.” Indeed not. She will be fulfilling a challenge she has set herself.

‘Time Sensitive’ runs to November 12, michaelwerner.com. ‘My Body, Your Choice’ is available with Music Unlimited