Ernest Vincent Wood III began his journey as a painter when an instructor recognized his affinity for light and encouraged him to pursue oil painting. After earning his BFA from Wichita State University in 2006, he studied at The International School for Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture in Umbria, Italy, under the sponsorship of the Kansas Cultural Trust. He has exhibited three times in Killarney, Ireland and, most recently, at the Evansville Museum, where he staged the show, Gravity. Paintings in which he rendered Bacchus as a female, entitled The Bacchae, now belong to that museum’s permanent collection and will be displayed in a two-year show featuring women in art. His recent painting, More Than Material, was selected by The Portrait Society of America as a finalist in the 2020-2021 International Portrait Competition. Wood’s sensitive use of light and realism in his paintings brings to 2021 the seventeenth-century technique of the Roman Caravaggisti and still-life artists of the Dutch Baroque, but with a contemporary twist of clever innuendos that make an Old World technique remarkably relevant.