Brian Shawn Woods is a thirty-three year old painter with a deep-seated tendency to misappropriate traditional doctrines of painting. Woods' work is influenced by an early generation of German expressionist painters as well as by the 1950s American movement of abstract expressionism. His work is characterized by a raw emotional quality, layers of crudely applied paint and haphazard color. His use of awkward composition allows liberation from traditional narrative and engages the abstract qualities of the quadrangle. Woods' paintings explore themes of marginality and exclusion as elements of domestic control and sexual manipulation.

From 1990 to 1996 he attended New York University, where he studied under abstract artist Gerry Bergstein and received a Masters in Fine Arts. Woods has had exhibitions in New York and in Philadelphia and his last exhibition was a group of abstract paintings entitled "Suspects". Woods' work has been featured in the Village Voice and ArtForum Magazine, as well as several publications in New York and Boston. Currently, Woods is continuing to develop his spectrally perplexing visual sensibility and is working on a new series of work for exhibit in 2007.