Strongly influenced by his Catholic upbringing, Allwood’s early work portrays icons and saints. In his later work, he turns his attention to everyday objects in his semi-rural environment – farm machinery, wood piles, sheep – and finally to people, solitary or in crowds. As Robyn Pickens notes, a strong sense of visual composition dominates Allwood’s paintings as he arranges his subjects into geometric shapes; Pickens suggests that this can be read as an expression of “the ways in which different states of being intersect, creating social patterns and meanings, even if we are not necessarily aware of them”.

In his most recent work, Allwood employs cropping as his compositional device, producing paintings of faces, in extreme close-up, that fill the frame and extend out beyond its boundaries. In these works, the drips and dribbles of paint that characterised his earlier paintings become deliberate streaks and patches of colour running from top to bottom, creating an illusory sense of distance from the subject, who regards us from the other side as if through an imperfect screen or a glass pane glazed with rain. They produce an uncanny feeling that we are not the viewer but the viewed.