Noel Wood

Wood was born in 1912 in Strathalbyn, South Australia. He was the fourth son of Rev. Tom Percy Wood (1880 - 1957) and Fannie (née Newbury, 1880 - 1969). His elder brother, Rex Wood (1906 – 1970) was also a noted artist. His grandfather, Thomas Percy Wood (1855 – 1937) was an accomplished watercolourist (Ref: State Library of South Australia). Noel Wood attended Art School in Adelaide where his tutor was Marie Tuck.

Wood was a prolific landscape painter well known for his island lifestyle. His work was spontaneous and colourful in response to his tropical surroundings and is found in many public and private collections in Australia and overseas. He was also a noted portrait painter. He exhibited regularly in Adelaide and Sydney.

Noel met Eleanor Weld Skipper, whom he married in 1933, at Art School in Adelaide and they lived and painted on Kangaroo Island, S.A., residing in the house of Noel’s brother, Dean, for two years before setting out in a T-model Ford ‘to find an island of their own’. They purchased 15 acres on Bedarra Island, North Queensland and made a grass shack in which to live before building a home they called the "House of Singing Bamboo" (sadly non-existent after Cyclone Yasi). They had two daughters, Virginia Maray and Ann Oenone. Noel lived on the island for 60 years. After painting just about everything on Bedarra, he became a well-known sight in Tully and on Dunk Island with boards strapped to his back, heading out to paint. At one stage he also taught art classes in Tully, sailing over to Tully Heads in his small craft. He was always interested in permaculture and established productive gardens including every coconut palm and all other fruiting trees to be seen on his part of the island.

Despite coping with death adders, echidnas and megapodes on land; hungry birds daily sweeping down from the skies; insects munching his tender greens; searching the beaches for materials to use for building his house and introducing goats, hens and guinea fowl - not to mention chatting with his many visitors, particularly the press, he still painted prodigiously every day.

During WW2, Wood packaged fifty of his best paintings to exhibit in London at Leicester Galleries as soon as the War ended. The exhibition was to be opened by the British painter Augustus John. The crate of works was despatched on Queensland Rail but went missing en route and never reached Sydney, where Wood awaited them. It was never found. Bitterly disappointed, Wood took ship to London, anyway, and he painted in England, Ireland, France and Italy, paying his way by producing portraits, until returning to Bedarra to tend to his food gardens, wild hens and fruit trees – and to paint, of course.

In the 1950s, he was invited to the United States where he worked as an assistant art director in Hollywood and continued with his own painting before, once again, returning to the island. By 1972, Wood had finished painting, preferring to read, garden and converse with his visitors. Eventually, in the 1990s, he left his beloved hideaway for the mainland but, restless and missing the island, he moved four times, always establishing a food garden.

Noel Wood died in Tully, North Queensland, in 2001 at the age of 89. His daughter, Ann, makes this comment: "Dad painted every day, mostly on an easel, most often outdoors, and never looked at his palette while he painted – even when he was mixing the paint! He was resourceful, a voracious reader, a great cook, and wasn’t concerned about leading a ‘regular’ life. The island was his paradise, his bolthole, he knew every inch of it and he loved it."