Keith Wood

Keith Wood was born in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, in 1944, and spent his early years in Dartmouth and Halifax. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1964, where he was the recipient of the Donald C. McKay Award, and a Teaching Certificate from Nova Scotia Teacher's College in 1965. He later received a Design Management certificate from the University of Manitoba in 1973. Wood served as a sessional instructor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and later worked as a team leader and program leader for graphic and media courses in the United Kingdom.

Wood made Winnipeg his home in the late 1960s. He worked as a graphic artist and founded an advertising agency before pursuing his true passion as a visual artist. For many years, he held other jobs, including factory work and driving a cab, to support his family while developing his artistic practice. Wood was an accomplished abstract artist who worked with acrylic and oil paints for nearly 30 years before beginning to use encaustic (pigmented molten wax) in 2006 to explore its unique properties. He was drawn to encaustic because of its relationship with light, working in transparent layers that allowed light to refract through the wax and create the appearance of light coming from within the work.

Wood worked in the abstract genre, creating broad natural forms with evidence of the process and stages of development from which the work emerged. He rarely did preliminary sketches or drawings, preferring to write down thoughts rather than draw them. His approach to painting involved an intense dialogue with the work throughout the process, comparing it to the way a jazz musician dialogues with his instrument. Wood passed away on May 1, 2018, due to complications from a stroke.