Jessie Wood: The Architecture Of Art

In Athens in 1981, the artist Jessie Wood had a critically acclaimed show of paintings of the Aegean island of Spetsai, where she and her husband, Clem Wood, lived for four years.

Michel Deon, a member of the Academie Francaise, wrote of her work: "Here are the houses, windows, rooftops that we Spetsiotes had stopped seeing . . . Jessie Wood reintroduces us to their hidden beauty, artless mystery, mute tragedy, and simple pleasures."

"Curiously, this world seems uninhabited . . . Its life is secret and interior . . . With access only to facades, we are free to imagine, behind the closed doors and windows, the people we cannot see."

Plane Geometry

Recently Ms. Wood took a visitor on a tour of her old Bridgehampton farmhouse and one of its barns, now a guest cottage for her eight children and stepchildren and their offspring.

In contrast to the colorful Greek artifacts and fabrics decorating the cottage, her paintings seem to stare out blankly: the opaque squares of white-washed walls, the flat black and pastel rectangles of doors and windows closed against the dazzling light.

We may note a row of terra-cotta roof tiles here, a trapezoid of cobalt sky there, or a ribbon of cobblestone street. But mostly these canvases are about the plane geometry of white walls standing in the sun.

"The last thing I wanted to do was paint cute little Aegean houses," Ms. Wood said of her austere works.

The Light Of Spetsai

"Spetsai isn't a touristy island like Mykonos or Hydra. It's a place Athenian families summer with their children, that's almost deserted in winter, inhabited only by fishermen and the odd assortment of marine biologists and renegade sailors who moor their boats in its sheltered harbor."

Determined to experience a winter on the seven-by-four-mile island, the Woods holed up one year without once visiting the mainland. "We got to know the local people and went to a lot of weddings," she said. "Over the years, I really sort of painted that whole island."

"A hommage to Spetsai in particular, Jessie Wood's show is also a hommage to the insular architecture of the Aegean Sea," Mr. Deon wrote. "The light in the islands redeems everything, explains everything."

"The light is everywhere there, creating those blinding, abstract facades," the artist said. "Here on Long Island, it's all mists and fog."

International Liaisons

Ms. Wood was born in Paris to a French mother, the glamorous socialite and prizewinning author Louise de Vilmorin, and Henry Leigh-Hunt, an American businessman who was her first husband.

International liaisons run in the family: her grandparents met on a cruise up the Nile. "A mutual history of horticulture brought them together," Ms. Wood said. The Vilmorin family had earlier standardized the common carrot and then made a fortune in wheat.

Her paternal grandfather, a global adventurer, was the president of Ames Agricultural College in Iowa at age 29 and later the founder of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. After losing all his money, he spearheaded an effort to build railroads in China and pioneered gold-mining in Korea.

Then came the voyage up the Nile, during which he noted that the Sudan had the perfect climate for growing cotton. He established plantations there and made another fortune.

Prewar Paris

The oldest of three daughters, Ms. Wood grew up in Paris in her mother's glittering circle of artists and intellectuals. Jean Cocteau was a friend, as were the King of Spain, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Marcel Achard, Orson Welles, Rene Clair, and Charlie Chaplin.

In 1933, the great French novelist and art historian Andre Malraux encouraged Madame de Vilmorin to write. Her first novel was published a year later, followed by stories, poems, and more novels, three of which were made into films.

This scintillating life was interrupted by World War II and the German occupation of Paris. Since French citizenship derives from the mother, the Leigh-Hunt daughters were considered French and forbidden by the Nazis to leave the country.

Art And Architecture

However, in 1941, Mr. Leigh-Hunt, then head of the trust department of the National City Bank in Paris, managed to smuggle his family out through Spain and Portugal to America. They lived in California.

The children attended school in Santa Barbara, and all but Ms. Wood returned to Paris right after the war. She went to Vassar, where she majored in art history with an emphasis - not surprisingly - on architecture; structural elements pervade her work.

After marriage to a Texas oilman which produced four sons but ended in divorce, Ms. Wood and her children moved back to Paris in 1961, where she worked in the American Embassy.

Expatriates

Three years later she married the scriptwriter Clem Wood. They had met at Vassar 15 years earlier on her first and only blind date, during which a Justice of the Peace whom they visited to settle a traffic ticket mistook them for eloping lovers and, a bit prematurely, prepared to marry them on the spot.

The couple settled in Paris, palling around with such American expatriates as James and Gloria Jones and Irwin and Marian Shaw. The European film makers Rene Clement, Volker Schlondorff, Roger Vadim, and particularly the late Louis Malle, were also close friends.

Fortunately, Mr. Wood spoke flawless French, although, said his wife, with an atrocious American accent. "At least he will never be mistaken for a spy," Madame de Vilmorin observed pointedly.

South Fork Residents

Eventually summers in Spetsai and winters in Paris began to seem rootless, especially to Mr. Wood. The couple returned to America in 1977 to visit the critically ill Mr. Jones in Sagaponack. Two years later they spent the summer with William Gaddis and Muriel Murphy in Wainscott and rented their house for the winter.

At the suggestion of the late Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, the Woods bought their present farmhouse in 1981. "It was falling down, but very cozy," Ms. Wood remembered. "Clem was smitten, while I was appalled by the amount of work, and heat, it needed."

Ms. Wood had continued to paint throughout the globe-trotting years, selling her work in Paris and Athens. Now she settled down to tackle the South Fork and its famous light.

In A New Light

Her canvases changed, the blazing whites replaced by the heavy greens of potato fields and the dun of winter marshes. The intense Mediterranean blues paled into silver, and human habitations vanished. Ducks and birds found their way into her new landscapes, which she showed at the Elaine Benson Gallery.

"I go into nature and do drawings and take extensive notes on something that catches my eye," she said. "It's always a geometric shape, the way a spit of land slides into the water like a crocodile, the arch of a bridge against the sky. Then I do the actual painting in my studio."

For a time, after her husband died of cancer two years ago, she stopped painting. "It used to be such fun," she said. "We worked together, he downstairs in his den and I upstairs in the attic."

"He was in charge of lunch, and called me when it was ready. It was hard to get started again; I kept waiting for him to call."

Minimal Abstracts

With the help of the artist Whitney Hansen, who coaxed her into her own studio, Ms. Wood got back to work. "Once you start, it has its own life," she said.

She showed recent watercolor-gouaches at the Benson last spring for the first time since her husband's death.

"I was pleased with what I did," she said. "They were very abstract landscapes that used only three colors: red, yellow, and blue, for example, or ocher, blue, and green, or, in fall, brown. They're simple, and minimal; I'm against being too literal."

Ms. Wood gazed out her kitchen window at the sun reflecting through the yellow leaves of a maple tree.

"I also enjoy gardening," she said - her garden is well known - "and just doing nothing. I like to sit here, and look at the pretty light."