By Dave O’Brien | Staff Writer
Friends and contemporaries say Kent artist Robert E. Wood didn’t bow to pressure just to sell his art.

Critical, sometimes brash and regarded publicly as an odd person with a bizarre nickname, Wood is considered by some in Kent’s tight-knit art community to be a “pure” and “mature” artist with an eye for talent.

Wood died Sunday of a heart attack at his Kent home. He was 68. What he leaves as his legacy in the Kent art community isn’t yet known.

Wood “had very specific ideas of what art should be. Anything that didn’t make it ... he told you exactly what he thought, with no filter,” said Cass Mayfield, co-owner of the McKay Bricker Art Gallery in downtown Kent. She and her husband, Bob, were Wood’s neighbors for 17 years at their gallery’s previous location on North Mantua Street.

Wood often stopped in at McKay Bricker, where “he critiqued everything,” Mayfield said, adding with a laugh that “we weren’t always happy to see him.”

But Wood “certainly had his own flavor. He was interesting to people. They noticed him,” she said.

Mayfield said she bought a painting Wood did of the building that once housed her gallery, which was later torn down as part of the Fairchild Avenue Bridge project.

F. John Kluth, who owns the FJKluth Gallery on North Water Street, displays and has sold Wood’s work. He called Wood a trained, mature artist whose eye only got better with time.

Wood was a staple at the Haymaker Farmers Market and Art in the Park in Kent, and patronized many art exhibits and performances in Kent. A retrospective of his work recently was displayed at the Stone Tavern in Kent.

Outside of Kent, Wood showed some of his work at the SPACES gallery on Superior Viaduct in Cleveland, Mayfield said. He won an Ohio Arts Council grant and took home awards from regional art competitions. Kluth said he often took Wood to shows and exhibits and tried to get him to sell more art. Wood declined to bend to pressure to become more popular, he said.

Wood had an impressive ability to recall artists and their work that Kluth said he often used as a resource.

Jeff Ingram, executive director of Standing Rock Cultural Arts in Kent, said he followed Wood’s work “through quite a few phases.” Ingram puts it in the genre of “modern art.” It wasn’t for everyone, he said.

“His take on what the world was like and all about was pretty strong,” Ingram said. Wood “put it in a context not many people can understand.”

Wood was “fascinated by layering things through transferring and printing things on a Xerox machine,” Ingram said, and later by barcodes and computer-aided art.

Ingram said Wood was sometimes labeled as an “outsider” artist — something typically reserved for those without formal art training. He had formal training, though, obtaining two art degrees from Kent State University in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

“I would listen to him talk, and knew that he knew what he was talking about, but it was beyond me,” Ingram said.

The term “lowbrow art” — referring to a movement also known as pop surrealism that came up in the late 1970s — also is used to describe Wood. Ingram said he wouldn’t label Wood that way.

He said he has hours of taped interviews with Wood talking about art to sort through.

“To me, he belongs in the Smithsonian, but I guess that’s for our historians to figure out,” Ingram said.

A memorial service in celebration of Robert E. Wood’s life and artwork will be held at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Kent at 10 a.m. Saturday.

A reception, including a display of Wood’s artwork, will immediately follow the service.