Wowwood exists because wood is too often forgotten.

Not as a material — wood is everywhere — but as a carrier of meaning. In art
history, wood usually appears as a footnote: as a support for paint, as a craftsmanly initial stage, as something that eventually had to be overcome.
Those who look closely see how unjust this is.

I started Wowwood out of anger.

When I began learning to work with gouges, I wanted to know everything about wood in art
history. Which artists took the material seriously. How wood influenced their thinking. I picked up a standard work: Janson's. More than a
thousand pages thick, required reading at art academies and present in virtually every museum cabinet.

What I found was staggering.

Wood carving seemed to end in Janson's around the year 1455, with a sculpture of Mary
Magdalene by Donatello. After that, wood virtually disappeared from view. Even in later movements, the number of illustrations featuring wood remained
embarrassingly low. For someone who works with wood, this handbook was completely inadequate.

So I decided to start collecting myself.

A Correction to the Canon

Wowwood presents short biographies of artists who have worked with wood. From
Riemenschneider to Jeff Koons. From the medieval prayer nuts of Dirksz to computer-generated sculptures by McCarthy. Not as a complete overview, but as a
growing correction to a failing 'Art Bible'. There are already a hundred articles online.

The texts are journalistic in tone. I read what art historians write, but I write from the
perspective of the maker. I want to know how artists work. What types of wood they use. What the material does to their ideas.

The craftsmanship aspect of woodworking is structurally undervalued in the formal art
world. As if thinking and making are separate. As if people who work with their hands have no ideas or ideals.

My research revealed something different.

Remarkably many great artists worked with wood precisely at the beginning of their
careers. The material helped them with their concept formation. I found early wooden sculptures by Picasso and Karel Appel, but also by many others. These
works are not always canonical, but often essential for their later development.

Wood as a Carrier of Time

Wowwood is not an archive. It is more of a quest.

Here I also show my own work and my development as a maker. In wood, time becomes visible:
growth, deceleration, resistance. Wood forces attentive work. It invites sustainable thinking, not as a slogan but as practice.

In this development, the story contained within the wood itself becomes increasingly
important. The material is not a substrate, but a starting point.

I have called this thinking Dendroism, after the Greek dendron —
tree.

Dendroism is not an art movement or dogma. It is an attitude. Working with the material,
not against it. Recognizing that nature itself is a designer, with an unsurpassed sense of form, structure, and the recording of time.

Wowwood has thus also become a platform for artists who do not reduce wood to a means, but
take it seriously as a co-player, as a co-creator.

Personal Practice

I count myself among that group.

My own work in wood I create in the studio of Guts en Klopper in Huis ter Heide. Many
ideas stem from my background as editor-in-chief of P+ (People Planet Profit), the media platform for sustainable developments, of which Wowwood is
part.

In 2026 my first book will be published, in which I present Dendroism as an artistic
attitude. The book will be published by Atticus Publishers.

Wowwood is not a neutral website. It is an invitation to look differently. At wood. At
art. And at what we quickly pass by and too quickly forget.

Email me!