Christopher Wood’s physical, expressionist paintings reflect the coastal environs around Dunbar where he lives. Heavily textured and vibrant compositions using specifically natural materials drives him to look beyond the surface but into the depths and edges of space en-capturing the forces of the natural world. Self confident and bold rhythms, torn edges and delicate marks tempt us to look inward at our own internal energies; a clever transference of nature onto man. Like with any relationship we absorb what we wish for in life from those things and people around us, the natural environment is a powerful personality that cant be ignored.

Immersion – The Art of Christopher Wood

The art of Christopher Wood RSW is defined by immersion in the materiality of painting as a transformative process. This latest body of work reflects the evolution of Wood’s practice in a series of paintings and mixed media works which display the artist’s tenacity and skill; balancing instinctual, spontaneous marks with structural elements of composition. Inspired by the artist’s coastal environment near his home in Dunbar, Wood’s palette is infused with the reflection and absorption of light to be found in ever changing elements of Scottish land and seascape. The artist’s choice of colour echoes the relationship to subject in his work; defined not by naturalism but the visualisation of an interior world, both sensual and cerebral. The opaque qualities of acrylic often used in his mixed media works create subtly layered surfaces that heighten our sense of illumination through abstraction.

In Undertow (Acrylic, mixed media on panel) 2012 it is the delicacy of the textural surface of the image that seduces; in the distressed panel, the residual stain of colour and feeling, together with the lyrical, organic forms that give the work it’s subtly shifting rhythm. The physical separation of raw materials feels alchemical with reactive pigment applied and scraped away as part of the creative process. This quality can also be seen in After the Rain (Acrylic & collage on board) 2012, where bare bones of the earth or self are exposed in bold gestural marks at the centre of the image. This small square composition reads very much like a triptych with the placement of red behind a linear separation of emulsified white and black pigment, figurative in its associations. The distressed texture of wood and the feeling of colour washed from the soul permeate this tremendously powerful composition. Wood’s handling of his chosen materials lays bare human presence in the work, in the reaction of substances or impulses within the individual unearthed by the cleansing element of water. Although of a modest scale the emotional gravitas of After the Rain extends beyond the physical frame. The materiality of Wood’s work conveys not just a tactile engagement with forces present in the natural world but within ourselves.

Undertow (acrylic, mixed media and collage on panel – 45.7cm x 50.8cm) is a particularly fine example, a work that references natural elements of cloud in its circular forms and richly textural surfaces, presenting a sense of imaginative space in the conceptual arrangement of form and use of materials. The human mark is ever present in intuitive scratched, drawn and brush marks which operate in perfect counterpoint with more formal elements of the composition. The balance of vertical and horizontal forms resembles Japanese design in their economy and elegance, rendered in dominant yellow and ochre. The internal architecture of this mixed media work is nature distilled to an idea; the feeling of luminosity in the emergence of the white ground, of light hitting the glistening shore and the creation on this two dimension surface of an expansive terrain within the heart and mind of both artist and viewer.

Within this body of work Sea Wall (Acrylic & collage on canvas) 2006 is a seminal painting, a work of monumentality and psychological depth that defies the relatively modest scale of the canvas. The artist’s handling of materials and choice of colour is particularly powerful and evocative. Deep wells of tactile colour are akin to Max Ernst’s technique of decalcomania in their intensity, plunging the viewer into a pool of dark emerald, expansive as the collective unconscious. The arrangement of three overlapping geometric forms, bleached and exposed with successive tides of pigment comprise shore and barrier to the immensity of the ocean beyond. The human element within this work can be felt in the fragile edges of textiles, gradation of hue seemingly immersing both these raw materials and the viewer in archetypal depths of our own imagining. The use of found materials is inspired and the sense of balance within the composition expertly poised. It is a work of transcendental physicality, pure visual poetry sensed and felt in the artist’s distillation of pictorial elements of line, tone, form, colour and texture.

Christopher Wood’s intuitive use of materials is superbly balanced by his knowledge of visual grammar, rooted in the European tradition of Western painting and Abstract Expressionism. Wood’s work references pintura matérica or material painting of the 1950’s exemplified by Antoni Tapies and Alberto Burri whose use of materials such as marble dust, sand, pumice, burlap and tar combined with more traditional art materials redefined the discipline of painting.  The influence of Braque’s Cubist collages in their use of fragments of text and everyday newsprint can also be found in the artist’s work. Graduating with Honours in Drawing and Painting from Edinburgh College of Art in 1984  and recipient of The James Torrance Memorial Award (RGI 1993), The Armour Award (RGI 1994), The Glasgow Art Club Fellowship (RSW 2005) and the  Sir William Gillies Award (RSW 2009), Wood’s distinctive work is represented internationally in private and corporate collections including: HRH Prince Charles the Duke of Rothesay, the Bank of Scotland, United Distillers, Edinburgh University, Lennox Lewis, The Demarco European Foundation, MacRoberts Solicitors, Premier Property Group and Phoenix Equity Partners. Since his first solo show in 1987 his work has continued to evolve, a process of poetic distillation clearly driven by the artist’s technique and a willingness to push the boundaries of his own practice.

Grey Dawn (Acrylic/collage on paper) 2008 gives insight into the artist’s creative process, a page from a sketchbook perforated at the edges, heavily textured with fragments of collaged text and delicate washes of blue, umber and green. Like Sea Wall there is recognition of many of the distinctive elements of Wood’s practice that are refined in later works. Spring Tide (Oil on Canvas) 2012 is a wonderful example, a large scale composition of pure abstraction where formal structure and instinctual mark are equal partners. Wood creates extraordinary depth in the overlap of colour, creating tension and cohesion of form, colour and mark. A vibrant composition of ultramarine, cerulean, white, orange, yellow, calligraphic black with delicately laced accents of liquefied red, the artist creates a feeling of essential energy in tune with timeless cycles of tide and season. Characteristically human presence can be felt in the work, in sections scratched and crosshatched with layers of under painting exposed in all their intricacy. This mindful archaeology of the pictorial surface reflects the artist’s engagement with the art of painting and the expressive potential of raw pigment and as a means of human expression.

As in music, abstraction heightens the transformation of physical experience and sensation into emotive thought. A Piece of the Wind (Acrylic, mixed media & collage on panel) 2012 in its complex design reads like a piece of contrapuntal music with each formal element of the composition so intricately woven together that the method like the element of air is almost intangible. In abstraction we see, feel, or hear with immediacy, especially when traditional notions of subject are absent. In Edge of Green (Acrylic, mixed media, collage) 2012 it is the pure association of colour dominating the finely tuned composition that the viewer resoundingly responds to, a feeling which permeates our reading of the image as a whole.

Throughout his career Christopher Wood’s movement towards abstraction reflects immersion in his chosen environment and dynamic experimentation, grappling with the plastic elements of image making to create potent and contemplative spaces for the imagination.

Walking through the rooms of Christopher Wood’s airy, late Georgian house, perched above the East Lothian shoreline is not unlike taking a trip through the artist’s mind. Every wall is hung with his work: from the earliest experiments of the mid Eighties to recent paintings, some destined for this exhibition. At every turn you find yourself making cross-references between the works and so it becomes possible, even without help from the artist, to construct a time scale of his development as a painter. Here are the landscapes with which he made his name and close by one of those from a few years earlier, painted in southern France, en plein air and appearing very different from his latest work.

For the past few years now Wood has worked in an increasingly abstract format. He readily admits to the early inspiration of Nicholas de Stael and, while it has taken a little time to reach a place where he feels comfortable, it is equally clear that such historical reference is no longer essential.

The word which most readily comes to mind, as I move among Wood’s new paintings is ‘visceral’. There is something deeply intuitive about these works: alternately insistent, lyrical, emphatic and searingly emotive. This is painting from the heart, in its purest form. Wood is the first to admit that his chief sources of inspiration are profoundly personal, ranging from the birth of his first child, three and a half years ago to recent bereavement. There is certainly a sense of catharsis here, of painting out the emotion, but it is also impossible to deny the exuberant optimism of exploration. The idea that while paint is a means of self-expression, it is also an agent of self-discovery. The first painting in this new direction Wood called simply ‘New Ground’. In it he began to experiment with collage. The language of his familiar landscapes was still there as an anchor, but now this was no longer just a painting. It was an object. Process too began to become increasingly important. In a similar fashion to the 1950s master Alberto Burri, Wood applied large pieces of plain, brown hessian to create a matiere-inspired abstraction, redolent of the emotional scars which articulate human experience. Not only though did he add fabric to his canvas, but he also began to be more aware of the possibilities of subtracting: scraping away paint and scoring the surface. Here on occasion his work seems to move from Burri towards his contemporaries in post-war Paris: Tapies and Fautrier. At times Wood stands back and, with an uncanny ability to know precisely just what is enough, takes up a cloth, and wipes his surface almost smooth. The prime example is ‘Breathe’, which he is prepared to leave, instinctively, at a point where the impasto dries to conjure a hieroglyph or even, in the spirit of Franz Kline, a Japanese haiku.

The undeniable, at times almost human presence within Wood’s canvases is not always quite so benign. Paintings such as the huge ‘Cold Moon Rising’ have an aggressive, dominating spirit, driven perhaps by inner conflict. Indeed the sense of tension within such a piece as ‘Intrusion’ not only holds it together but ensures that the eye and the mind are constantly engaged. Similarly, in ‘Equivalence’ he allows us a glimpse of the void – drawing us into its ambient depths and leaving us breathless with a vision of the infinite. These are works which demand time from the viewer and repay it in equal measure.

It is significant that Wood chose to call another of the early works in his journey towards abstraction ‘…there be Dragons’ (frontispiece), ostensibly a reference to the old map-makers’ habit of writing this phrase at the ends of their known world. The title emphasises just how uncertain the artist was at the time about where his art might be going. But the words also imply a typically dogged determination to venture into the unknown. Again this work can be interpreted in the manner of a landscape, its horizon simply given a ninety degree turn or seen from the air as with the work of the great St Ives artist Peter Lanyon. Indeed, it is not too presumptious to suggest that the spirit of St Ives haunts Wood’s house. Again the mind constantly makes connections. Specifically in the fact that, while abstraction is his principle direction, Wood continues to produce such paintings as ‘Red Headland, Embrace’ which is obviously intended to function primarily in figurative terms. While this might come as a surprise to some, it is not uncommon and significantly an artist who comes immediately to mind is the late Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, the St Ives Colourist whose exuberant abstract paintings were fuelled throughout her life by studies of the landscape. Like Barns-Graham and her Cornish coterie: Nicholson, Frost, Wells, et al, Wood is affected by his surroundings. Rooted to his place in the world.

Standing in his studio, with the light flooding in from the seaward window, you begin to appreciate how this affects not only his choice of palette, but his consummate understanding of how paint works. How it reflects and absorbs the light and how it can be manipulated to create secret harmonies particular to a time of day or change in the weather. This, surely is what gives Wood’s art its convincing subtlety.

Unusually for a contemporary abstract artist, Wood delights in titles, although they are not always necessary. When he does use them though they bring just enough of a clue to a work to fire the imagination without numbing the effect. Typical is ‘I Can’t Quite Remember’, the title of a sublime, multi-layered painting whose presence might best merit the label ‘totemic’. More than any of the works here it testifies to Wood’s increasing ability to succeed utterly in his aspiration to create a painting which expresses in its simple timeless contrast of form and facture some nameless, fundamental aspect of the human condition.

In these latest works Wood asserts himself as an artist fully confident in his command of his created language of abstraction. Confident, bold and mature, at their best and in such a work as ‘The Climb, beyond mere words, they have the power to burn deeply and unforgettably into the psyche.

I am conscious that this essay has been peppered with the names of artists of the past and these should not be taken to suggest direct influences on Wood, but should rather be seen as the inevitable praise which any art historian bestows in his mind as he encounters references, observed, understood and assimilated. For while no art can entirely original, by the same token all art is unique and ultimately this work is Wood’s alone. It could never be anything else, such is the raw, creative energy to which these paintings are a lasting testimony.

The popular Scottish landscape painter Christopher Wood’s work has come on in leaps and bounds in the last few years. Working from his studio in Dunbar, the east coast shoreline, the ebb and flow of the tides and the Scottish elements have always played a part in his work, but it has been infused with a deep and vibrant colour that is imaginative as much as descriptive.

These days the work is taking a further turn with materials like cloth, paper and enamel to create distinctive hybrids between traditional oil painting and collage. The Scottish landscape is still there, but a furrowed field or a sea cliff might be captured in a ragged cloth edge instead of painterly line, a sunset rendered in a piece of fraying canvas.

Christopher Wood has taken the risk of freeing himself from the subject matter which has given him his reputation as a gifted landscapist. He is now a painter of what I must regard as ‘mindscapes’. However, these new paintings are possessed of the distinctive character associated with his work over the past ten years, particularly in the degree of sheer physical energy release which they make manifest.

Christopher Wood is an artist who could be regarded as a contemporary Scottish Colourist because colour is a dominant factor in the ways which he has found of depicting the ever-changing effects of light and weather typically Scottish, particularly those associated with Scotland’s shorelines where tidal forces create a dramatic encounter between land and sea.
Christopher Wood’s use of colour is given a special significance by the confident draftmanship inherent in every paint-laden brushstroke applied to the surface of his canvas.

Christopher Wood’s paintings, featuring in his second solo show at the Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh this month, tread a narrow path between representation and abstraction – and in this case that doesn’t constitute artbollocks. Inspired by the landscape around the artist’s studio in East Lothian, many of the oil paintings appear at first sight to be compositions of pure colour; but a prolonged glance will reveal scenes of hills, fields and coastlines of surprising depth and form. This reflects the way in which they are created: Wood claims to “start off with paint and work [his] way back to nature”. If you remain unconvinced, go to the gallery and see for yourself. The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 5th – 30th June 1999.

Field day

The countryside is just the starting point for Christopher Wood’s striking landscapes, writes Elizabeth Mahoney.

Artist Christopher Wood lives and works between two dramatically different landscapes. Looking out from his studio, to the north the land stretches down to the flat shore, the waters edge and the beautiful beaches of East Lothian; while to the south the lush rolling hills climb up to the stark and dramatic moorland of The Lammermuirs.

His home and studio nestle in the East Lothian countryside which forms a beautiful meeting point for the two. Similarly, Wood’s career can be described as a meeting of opposites. Starting out as a landscape painter after graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 1984, he began by producing canvasses which were infused with the natural forms and the scenes that surrounded him. As well as critical acclaim, prizes and awards, the loyalty of his early work to the local landscape drew comparisons with Joan Eardley’s paintings of Catterline on the North East coast and William Gillies’ Lothian landscapes.

At this stage, Wood’s painting was poetic and lyrical as his titles hint, ‘ I Wandered Alone Over The Beach (Under That Moon Where She Droops Almost Down To The Sea‘ and ‘Sweet Tremulous Days of Rain and Sun’ are typical. You hardly need to see the paintings to imagine the scenes. Now the titles are shorter and sharper, for example, ‘Hill Loch’ and ‘Red Storm’, and you need to see theses oil paintings, with their impasto textures and intense colours, to appreciate their spacial energy.

He explains the new brevity quite simply. “The titles I was using became overly important in people’s minds. This was finally brought home to me when I was introduced to somebody at an opening at the RSA and he began with ‘Ah yes, you’re the chap with the titles’. I thought, ‘No I’m the chap with the paintings actually’ and from then on I’ve preferred to keep my titles short and allow the paintings to speak for themselves.” But it’s not just the names which have altered. On the strength of new paintings on show at the Scottish Gallery, many would be tempted to label Wood an abstract painter. There are blocks of colour, puzzling forms, bewildering layers of shapes.

For the artist, it is less a case of moving between two irreconcilable traditions, more a natural progression in his painting process. “While my paintings are no longer topographical, for me they are still solidly grounded in Nature. They have to be. The meaning of a painting is now more about emotional responses, ‘process’ and feelings, but their inspiration and visual vocabulary still come from the land, from the same areas of East Lothian and other places I feel I know well. But I no longer go out to paint. I don’t set an easel up in the fields and draw what I see anymore.” This is partly due to his familiarity with the landscape, having been based in East Lothian for 15 years and absorbing enough to work solely from memory and the imagination. But it’s also a result of heavy weather in Provence a few years ago, which forced him to change his approach.

“I was working there for three months and it rained all the time. Because of the conditions, I couldn’t actually paint much outside and had to nip out between downpours to make quick sketches before returning to my studio. Because of this I was forced to work up these sketches into finished paintings in the studio, which of course is quite a different pursuit to working ‘en plain air’ as I was used to. At the time of course I was still trying to work in quite a realistic way, but because I was forced to work so much indoors with only my sketches to go on, I found I had to use my visual memory and my imagination more and more. This also coincided with my being introduced to the work of Nicholas de Stael by an artist friend who lives in France.

“When I came back and had my show, my earlier work seemed to me to be merely paintings of places and things. I remember quite vividly thinking there was more of interest in the colours and textures of my palette than there was in much of the work on the walls. It might sound strange, but I began then to try to marry the un-selfconscious beauty of my palette with the visual language I used in describing a scene.

“In Wood’s studio it’s easy to see what he means. There are swirls of oil paint, arranged in rows, one gorgeous colour upstaged by the next. If the early paintings were largely concerned with recording the natural landscapes, these new works are adventures in paint informed by that same landscape. “Most of my work involves layer upon layer of paint. Each is allowed time to dry before being scratched and scraped and layered again with more paint, before being set aside, while the focus moves to another canvas. Thus the finished painting is built up over time.

“I’ve been using transparent glazes more and more. By using very strongly pigmented paint scraped really hard across the canvas, all the textures in the layers below can once again be shown. I love paint. I love the ‘stuff’ of it. I love playing around with it.”

Wood’s studio is crammed with canvasses, some almost complete, and some in the early stages. A store room contains hundreds more which he selects from for over-painting and reworking. A number of the new paintings have been made in this way, with only the merest trace of the earlier composition visible.

The whole studio can, at times, be given over to work in progress, with each canvas being worked up over five or six different periods. “I have no idea where the painting will go and I’m always happy when I surprise myself. I spend a great deal of time listening to each canvas to divine it’s particular voice. I turn it around, upside down, thinking,’what the hell is that?’. Eventually, I begin to see what the painting could be. “It’s chaotic, it’s improvisational, and I enjoy that,” he says, with a beam.

The finished paintings are anything but chaotic and the strong relationship with surrounding landscape is still present. In the majestic ‘Between The Moors And The Sea’, for all its play with paint, swathes of deep blue mark the sea and sky, and the sun shines down. The fertile land by the shore is suggested by patches and cubes of colour. Further back, wide expanses of uncluttered, less busy and highly textured canvas demarcate the higher, wilder moor land.

“Between The Moors and The Sea’ is about living here in East Lothian”, Wood explains.”My girlfriend and I were thinking of buying a house in West Lothian but every time we came back here, we realised we didn’t want to leave. So it’s about this place. It’s not topographical. There are no ‘views’ you could find round here, but it nevertheless encompasses, for me, the ‘idea’ of living here. These days I start off with paint and work my way back to nature.”

From a poet and his painters to a painter-poet. *

Christopher Wood is no longer up and coming; he is unequivocally up. Not that we have yet seen the best of him. In his mid thirties, Edinburgh-trained, living and working in East Lothian, he paints landscapes which are still-lifes and still-lifes which expand into landscapes of the mind. He is an abstractionist with a precise sense of volume and form. His palette is delicate yet capable of bursting into rich and glowing luminosity. You will see pictures within pictures, skies and seas where there are none, sensuality in the bleakest landscape.

Wood’s latest exhibition, at The Scottish Gallery, is confirmation of his maturity. He has always been able to manipulate paint and give it voice, take what he wanted from De Stael’s spatial anarchy and lyrical economy, then bring his own energies and vision to images whose only sense lies in the visual music they make. The role of designer-draughtsman, such a cosy refuge for artists with nothing to say, is not for him. If you look long enough you will hear him quite clearly. No need, now, for titles like I’d Rather Learn From One Bird How To Sing Than Teach Ten Thousand Stars How Not To Dance, or Before Why’s First Because. The paintings say it all – and better.

Magic Circle of Life

It was worth risking the yellow peril of East Lothian’s acres of rapeseed to see the work of two painters – in age, generations apart; in style, continents apart. Christopher wood graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1984 – “but I don’t think of myself as having trained there,” he says. “I trained here, looking out beyond Traprain Law, sketching in the fields, until I had absorbed enough of the landscape to work now only in the studio, entirely from my imagination”. Wood’s solo show of more than 40 abstractions of the world on his doorstep – at the Macaulay Gallery at Stenton, near Dunbar – is his sixth there in a row. In between he has been hung at the RSA (Royal Scottish Academy) and won two important prizes at annual shows of the Royal Glasgow Institute.

Wood’s canvasses have moved up in scale and, as a consequence, his images have become more structured and forceful. He still conjures dreamy atmospheric passages of resonating colour, almost liquid in their coalescent intensity, and he has the gift of making these expressionist essays complete in themselves. But the larger works are rooted in more solid statements which invite specific interpretation – linear forms which introduce harsher textures, planes of scumbled broken colour, Sea and Sky, sun and moon, are indivisible, but is that dense mass a rock formation or harbour mouth, Traprain Law or the Bass Rock itself? Do those darts of high colour serve only as pictorial accent, or could they be prayer flags recalled from a recent trip to the Himalayas?

These are challenging works, some more coherent than others, but all bold and painterly. His titles are poetically unspecific. ‘The moon lends away its light’, ‘At the drop of dusk’, and ‘At the round earth’s imagined corners I do dwell’. It is fair to quote back at him that his world is a circle “of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere”. There is a hint of Eardley in his palette and his graceful division of space, and a suggestion too, of the aerial vision of William Burns, but in this exhibition Wood has begun to lay claim to the landscape he has lived in and learned to read during all the years of his adult life – as Gillies did in the same airt, and as Eardley did at Townhead and Catterline.

Christopher Wood’s East Lothian studio…

is set between the moors and the sea and his creative imagination feeds off these elemental sources to produce lyrical responses. His style, influenced by Philipson and Eardley, moves ever closer to the abstraction of Nicholas de Stael. This is evident in two fine small works at the RSA and even more emphatic in a show of 30 canvases which has just opened at the Vicarage Cottage Gallery, North Shields. His titles, like Sweet Tremulous Days Of Rain and Sun and The Far and Flowerless Fields of Ice, might seem to be trying to do to much of the work if his paintings were not, in themselves, charged with such poetic expression. Beyond handling texture and colour in the best traditions of the Edinburgh school, and observing the true lie of the land and mood of the sea, he manages to suggest that on the right day he can paint the wind and the smell of flowers in a meadow.