Cherry Hood (b. c. 1950), is an artist well known for her haunting, large-scale images of faces. Working for preference in watercolour, which she allows to bleed and drip, Hood specialises in intense depictions of mostly anonymous subjects. With a studio based in the Southern Tablelands of NSW, she has embraced her landscape surrounds, sometimes incorporating it into her figurative works. In 2000, Hood gained her masters degree from Sydney College of the Arts with a thesis comprising an investigation of 'gender politics and cultural mores and taboos surrounding the representation of the male body'. The following year she held her first solo exhibition at Mori Gallery, Sydney. Since then, she has exhibited in solo and group shows in Australia and internationally, including in the National Portrait Gallery's Contemporary Australian Portraits in 2002. Following her Archibald Prize win in 2002 for her portrait, Simon Tedeschi unplugged, she won the Kedumba Drawing Award in 2003. Amongst her portrait subjects are painters Matthys Gerber, Ben Quilty and Michael Zavros, and pianist David Helfgott. Her portrait of Tedeschi is one of a number of Archibald winners in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. Hood's works are in state collections around Australia and in public and private collections around the world.
