CHR ISTOPHER WOOD ANCIENT SONGS
COVER IMAGE
Look Again | CHRISTOPHER WOOD
acrylic on mixed media on box panel | 91cm x 58cm
+44 (0) 1463 783 230
art@kilmorackgallery.co.uk Kilmorack Gallery, Inverness-shire iv4 7al SCOTLAND
Through the Air to the Sea
acrylic and mixed media on panel 30cm x 60cm
I visit Christopher Wood in his Dunbar home. This is an artist’s house, with three stories of paintings and an air of quiet calm, until you reach the studio. On the walls are decades of Wood’s work, from the 1980s until now, and these show an artist who has always evolved. Threaded through all these works - from large abstracts, still lives and landscapes - is a core of quality and a sensitivity to the world.
Christopher Wood leads the way upstairs to his studio. Through the window, outside, is the sea - the East Lothian coast with cold waters, harbours and seaways that connect Dunbar and Wood to the world. We discuss life as an artist who has embraced abstraction. ‘I once painted more recognisable work,’ Christopher Wood tells me, ‘but now I need to make work that connects in a deeper more personal way. It’s not easy.’
He tells me about the struggles to make colour and form balance, and the excitement that comes when something works, and the frustration when that special energy fails to arrive. ‘Cosmic energy,’ I suggest, and he shrugs. A painting without energy is just canvas and paint, too pictorial for Wood. This is one of the mysteries of all art forms - the energy - and it is more musical than verbal.
I look out the window and at the paintings that are either on easels, or drying, awaiting framing for this exhibition, and I imagine for an instant that I am in a lighthouse and that these paintings are foghorning the personal stories of a life lived.
‘The work remains unfinished until it starts to make sense to me,’ he tells me. ‘When the abstract marks that I have struggled with begin to remind me of the wind, or the sea - an element of landscape - then they are no longer just marks.’
Christopher Wood is a lover of poetry and there are often Dylan Thomas’s words collaged into his compositions. Like a painting, a successful poem contains rhythm and mystery. The connection is a single poet to a single reader connection. It’s personal and human - and an antidote to the artificial intelligence which looms on the horizon. A computer and well-trained logic will never know what it is like to walk the same walk every morning, to follow a small sniffing dog and to feel alive. These are the things that are put into Christopher Wood’s paintings and are what emerges when his work goes beyond a collection of marks. They are evidence of our mortal existences and are what makes the song in Wood’s work so ancient and recognisable.
Some paintings in this exhibition have an immediacy, a quickness. ‘Clatter of Birds’ is light like air. It is a painting that rises with energetic yellows and greens. The birds are dark untethered forms. ‘How Wonderful Summer Was’ scorches with reds, oranges and yellows and cools with sea-
sonal changes - the coming darks and blues of winter. We look through Wood’s droplet marks in ‘If it was Raining Still’ and, in ‘Through the Air to the Sea,’ we journey through a red-yellow-white land, out to a sea of cooler colours.
There is a fluent painted-language seen in all these paintings. The power of colour, texture and shape take us to a realm of feeling which lies below (or above) the more ordinarily seen world.
It is time to leave Christopher Wood’s studio and to journey north to Kilmorack. As I drive, gusts blow curtains of debris across the road, and further on swirls of snow form patterns in front of the windscreen. Dark clouds and even clear blue skies appear before they vanish. How extraordinary and changing the seen world is, I think. It seems like a dream on a long hypnotic drive. Christopher Wood is one of the few artists that lets us slip through the atoms in the images in front of us, and allows us see further still into a poetry of colour.
Tony Davidson, Kilmorack Gallery
How Wonderful the Summer Was acrylic and mixed media on box panel 91cm x 122cm
Their Voices Fading Away acrylic and mixed media on panel 100cm x 70cm
If it was Raining Still acrylic and mixed media on panel 46cm x 61cm
Out of the Wind
acrylic and collage on panel
61cm x 31cm
76cm x 91cm
Christopher Wood is an elected member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour (RSW,) an elected member of the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts (RGI), Past-President of the Society of Scottish Artists (SSA), and a professional member of both Visual Arts Scotland (VAS) and the Paisley Art Institute (PAI).
Wood trained at Edinburgh College of Art, graduating with an Honours degree in Drawing & Painting in 1984.
He has been a full-time professional artist since his first one-man exhibition in Edinburgh 1987.