Description

Dimensions

6 x 9

Medium

acrylic on Georgia pinewood

Tom Wright’s Georgia Pine Series: Art as Trauma Processing

Tom Wright’s powerful body of work emerges from the depths of the Georgia forest, where the artist retreated following the traumatic aftermath of September 11th. Using taekwondo breaking boards crafted from Georgia pinewood the same boards designed to absorb and fracture under the force of a martial artist’s strike Wright transformed instruments of controlled violence into canvases for emotional release and healing.

Each painting captures the raw kinetic energy of his process: working in solitude among the pines, Wright applied acrylic paint not with traditional brushstrokes alone, but through the physical force of strikes and impacts reminiscent of martial arts practice. The boards themselves, typically 9-12 inches wide and designed to break under pressure, became metaphors for his own psychological state objects meant to absorb impact, to channel force, to ultimately fracture and transform.

The resulting works are heavily layered and textured, each application of paint representing another effort to process the trauma, another physical release of grief and anger. The natural grain of the Georgia pine remains visible through the paint in places, grounding these explosive emotional expressions in the organic materiality of Southern wood. The acrylic builds up in thick, wind-like layers swirling, turbulent passages that suggest both the chaos of trauma and the gradual, determined work of healing.

Created in the therapeutic isolation of the Georgia forest, these paintings represent a radical fusion of physical catharsis and artistic expression, where each punch, each impact becomes a brushstroke in a larger narrative of survival and transformation.