Hiding in Plain Sight - James Maroney Inc.

surprisingly fresh wound with his extravagantly-sized, red-painted hatchet, all ideas—
felling, cherry, red, and cutting—vulgarly associated with the metaphorical taking of
virginity.
The figure of George brandishing his axe has been called castrating and, in the Freudian
sense, it isn’t only women who commit this outrage upon their sons. Young men aspire to
their fathers’ power and authority, the basis for which is the phallus. 67 Fathers, who, in
one way or another, withhold from their sons the succession of (sexual) power, are also
said to be castrating.
George confronts his father and never was more
virile father figure painted in American art, with
his red coat, his legs spread akimbo, his feet
planted with confidence, his gestures assured and
authoritative, his maleness jutting proudly from
his tight breeches: he fairly brims with it. Wood
is retailing the early loss of his own father, a man
he barely knew but clearly one to whom he
would impute great force and power. The father
asks here not for contrition but to oblige his son
to yield back the instrument that did the cutting.
African-Americans, depicted here as eighteenthcentury
slaves, make their only appearance in
Wood’s work, a reference to one under-class,
among two others—gays and Jews—with whom
Wood displayed a poignant empathy.
Village Slums, Mixed media, 1936-37
With 16 appearances, the ubiquitous windmill is
Wood’s most private symbol. His frequent use of it, no matter how appropriate to rural
Iowa, elevates the windmill to the level of a signature, musical phrase or well above its
utility as a prop.
The windmill has a number of attributes—pumping, blowing, sucking, turning as with the
will of the wind—that would qualify it for a range of homoerotic analogies. Windmills, in
consequence, often appear more than once in a single composition. They are never in the
foreground but usually on the distant horizon or partly concealed, as in Haying, as if
hiding or coyly peeking out from behind trees. If, in his pictures, Wood deploys the
windmill as a presence synonymous with himself, then he indicates that he is sometimes
a distant presence, at others, a passive agent in the main action, or even a voyeur. In Self-
Portrait 1932-41 Wood gives to the windmill billing nearly equal to his own visage. The
significance of his outfit, a plain blue shirt but without overalls, we will get to shortly. 68
67 Taylor, op. cit., p. 90
68 In the preliminary Sketch for Self-Portrait, 1932, Wood presents himself wearing overalls.
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