Shandy Hall | The Laurence Sterne Trust

Cocks and Bulls: Paintings and Drawings by Tom Wood

Open Dates
28th April 13 - 9th June 13

To mark the 300th anniversary of the birth of Laurence Sterne (1713 – 1768), writer and vicar of Coxwold, North Yorkshire, the Laurence Sterne Trust has commissioned the renowned Yorkshire painter Tom Wood to produce a body of new work to celebrate the event. The title of the show is taken from the last line of Sterne’s  masterpiece Tristram Shandy : ‘A Cock and a Bull, said Yorick—And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard’.

Tom Wood, best known for his portraits (including those of HRH Prince of Wales and Alan Bennett, both now in the National Portrait Gallery), has in recent years turned his attention to the natural world. His work features many animals including intriguing portraits of prize winning bulls in which the animals seem to inhabit a mysterious world of signs and symbols.  In his own words, Wood is trying to ‘paint chickens as though they were race horses; trying to make us see afresh the things we frequently overlook’.  Wood’s animals, in particular his paintings of cockerels and bulls, are layered with multiple meanings and in the spirit of Sterne they can be ‘read’ in many different ways.

This will be Tom Wood’s first major exhibition of his work in nearly ten years and it will mark a significant shift.  Again, in the words of the artist, ‘I feel this need to celebrate the natural world and our relationship to it in all its complexity, poetry and ambiguity.  These paintings are my attempt to dig beneath the surface and marvel at the mysteries that lie there’.

Find out more about Cocks and Bulls: Paintings and Drawings by Tom Wood