CHRISTOPHER P.
WOOD
goldmark
Wood is a painter and printmaker of atmospheric and enigmatic imagery featuring magical, symbolic figures and signs in what the artist calls an exploration of the interior world of the imagination.
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front cover: Forest Born No 6, oil on paper, 2019, 45 x 37 cm
CHRISTOPHER P.
WOOD Max Waterhouse
goldmark 2019
CHRISTOPHER P. WOOD ‘No other artist of this period has achieved his highly original mixture of playfulness and insight. He has studiously avoided anything that might have led to decorative harmony or visual cosiness. Seen as a whole, his work irritates more often than it attracts. From the very beginning it has gone beyond normal artistic conventions, whether in painting or graphic work. He fascinates the viewer – at the same time he intrigues and disconcerts us. This double effect, which has its roots in his own temperament, is deliberate: “A painter may know what he does not want. But heaven help him if he wants to know what he does want. A painter is lost if he finds himself.”’ The art historian Dr Werner Spies wrote these words thirty years ago – not for Christopher P. Wood, for whom they seem so fitting, but for Max Ernst. Ernst was a mercurial artist; as elusive and illuminating as his quicksilver hair. Among a great many contemporaries to turn sex and subversion to their advantage, he stood out in two capacities: in unifying technique and content in his art, making the way he created, and the medium of that creation, part of the enigma; and in realising the tension between speculation and certainty, empiricism and poetry, that was to define our modern era of physics and philosophy. There is much of Max Ernst in Wood. For one, he has a sense of humour – and there is nothing worse than a Surrealist who takes themselves too seriously. He is a profoundly literary artist, too – always looking to language, folklore, the symbols and the stories that recur throughout our spoken, written history. And, like Ernst, Wood is both thief and cannibal: almost everything he makes is fed on the scraps of past experiences and endeavours – sometimes literally, as in the collages that incorporate torn pieces of Wood’s own rejected prints, or the slivers of damaged and unsaleable Pipers and Picassos smuggled to him by Mike Goldmark over the years.
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This exhibition, Wood’s second retrospective at the Goldmark Gallery, features work largely produced over the last 10 years. To Ernst’s enjoinder that ‘a painter is lost if he finds himself’, he has spent the greater part of that decade losing his tail. For a time, he gave up painting – the familiarity of the process, he says, had become stultifying – and turned his focus to printmaking instead, at a terrifying rate of production. Whatever the medium, he has worked consistently and prolifically in series and in sequence, but always as a fugitive from narrative: taking a known departure point and running from it until he is making pictures for which even he has no real explanation. Several years ago, these might have been self-conscious reflections on the ‘Sublime’ moment and the imaginative tradition, full of art historical reference. Now, Wood is pursuing mystery in its own right: a figurative art where there is no figuring out to be done.
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Dark Wood, etching, 2013, ed 10, 18 x 24 cm Wanderer, (detail), oil on canvas, 2011, 101 x 106.5 cm
Max Ernst’s guiding principle, wrote Spies, was to go ‘Beyond Painting’. Wood too has gone ‘beyond painting’ – it could be the title of this exhibition, which ranges from thin, luminous oils on canvas to paintings on paper primed with gorgeous, superflat gesso; from experimental etchings and monoprints to encaustics, drawings in wax made over a hot plate; and from individual collages – reveries of delicate tongue-in-cheek, arranged in recycled material – to whole livres d’artiste, doctored with gold leaf and monotype and inked marginalia. When Ernst discovered that in softground etching he could replicate the trace effects of frottage and grattage, the rubbing techniques he popularised, it opened to him new ways of thinking about print. This kind of ‘integrated practice’ has formed the cornerstone of Wood’s philosophy. In monoprints like ‘Angel’ and ‘Island’ he has given them the impulsiveness and the gestural independence of a painter; and in his China blue paintings and the coloured gessoes, he has prepared and sequenced with the programmatic vision of a printmaker. His working method combines Surrealist automatism and ad-lib, drips and pours, with technical foresight and precision – and it is to his great credit that his practical expertise never interrupts their atmosphere of mysterious creation.
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The World of a Dog, hand-coloured etching, 2017, ed 15, 19.5 x 15.5 cm Island, (detail), monoprint, 2011, 61 x 58 cm
The word ‘Sur-real’ has bound with it the notion of the ‘beyond’. It hints at a reality that is bigger or deeper, a ‘heightened’ state of seeing. As a result, we tend to think of Surreal artists as operating in a different register, but with Wood this is rarely the case. The things he sees and paints, however unearthly they may seem, are definitively of this world: not a world of dreams and subconscious desires, but of received metaphor; one where, for the fleetest of moments, a tree root breaching a pile of leaves really is a paradisal snake; where cigarette-strewn suburban footpaths lead to purgatorial hinterlands, park estates are swallowed by ravening wildernesses, and birds in shelterbelt parliaments deliver ominous portents from on high. In the history of Western painting, there have been few artists to have really tapped this sense of an ‘otherworld’ – of a second veil of strangeness, simultaneous and coexistent with our own reality. Ernst, certainly, was one; and long before him, Blake, Goya, and Bosch were others (a list by no means conclusive). Each combined technical virtuosity with visual lucidity. And each understood intensely that the worlds and creatures they pictured held a mirror to the particular crises of their times: for Bosch, to the rule of fear and guilt in original sin; for Goya, the death of human kindness in the jaws of greed, pride and dogma; for Blake, the individual spirit crushed under industry and institution; and for Ernst, the existential crises of a century twice-sundered by international war. In what kind of world does Christopher P. Wood find himself? A technocratic world; one of aspirituality; in which our day-to-day reality is multiply fractured and manufactured; and in which human history, whether long past or present, no longer persists as some monolithic foundation but as a quaking, shifting, thing in flux: like a bed of sands, to be whipped and scattered on an algorithmic whim. Something of this new, changeable landscape is there in Wood’s pictures. As a maker of series, there is no end to his work. Everything is another genesis, a seeding of new ideas and processes without conclusion. In etchings like ‘Puppet Master’ and ‘Queen of Shadow’, a smoky top layer printed from carborundum gives the effect of realities overlaid or overridden. Chief among his tools is the play and passage of light: a grand spectrum of transparencies and opacities, colours waxing and waning, paintings and prints in positive and negative. In ‘Pandemoneum’ and ‘The Terrible Tightrope’ it makes a kind of ghostly limboland, somewhere slipped between a sleeping and waking state.
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The Terrible Tightrope, (detail), oil on gesso on paper, 2018, 56 x 66 cm
André Breton, first pope of the Surrealist church, hoped that the Surrealist mission to plumb the subconscious might supplement what he called the ‘peu de réalité’ – the ‘paucity’ of our existence. But the reality today’s Surrealist would be faced with is one of numbing plenitude. The super-computers we hold in our pockets deliver us instant and constant communication streams. On trains and buses, umbilically plugged to them, we commute in our own televisual bubbles. And in vast, nebulous ‘clouds’ we host libraries of memory: a great, intangible nexus of snapshots and documents and indistinct information recorded only on our screens as ‘Other’. We now live in collage – passwords and profiles, socialmedia selves, all remote moving parts to be rearranged and revised at a moment’s notice. This is the great multiverse we have built ourselves. In the abstract, it has all the magnificence and mystery of Wood’s modern-day pantheistic myth; but for most of us, our daily digital existence remains as devoid of the extraordinary and the imaginative as it always has been. When William Blake looked on the paintings of his older rival, Joshua Reynolds, and saw in their naturalism only superficiality, he blamed them on what he termed the ‘vegetative eye’ – how prescient he was in his language. In this
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Bear, aquatint, 2013, ed 10, 20 x 19.5 cm The Castle Ghost, oil on gesso on paper, 2019, 66 x 57.5 cm
screen age we have created whole ‘otherworlds’ without any deeper sense of the otherworldliness that surrounds us: that pagan sense of the ‘spirit of things’ that takes so many forms in Wood’s art: in his prophet birds and his puckish sprites, his Adams and Eves, his cats and dogs, the roots and ladders, worms and fish, suns and moons, sea-bucked boats and lighthouse mountains, the tunnels, trees, waves, forests, streams, shadows, apparitions and all-seeing eyes. As it was of Blake, it now seems as much Wood’s task to reinvigorate our sense of the deeply known and the unknowable things of this world.
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The Annunciation, etching & aquatint, 2014, ed 15, 20 x 24.5 cm Infinity Conversation, oil on gesso on paper, 2016, 68.5 x 55 cm
The earliest painting in this show is called ‘Touchstone’. A vast landscape looming with disquieting familiarity, it seems an appropriately named painting on which to end. It stands in this show as a reminder that the mysterious, evolving mythology with which Wood has populated his art over the last twenty years has its roots sunk deep in our recognisable world. The life-giving trees of ancient forests, the vital springs and wriggling microbes, the caverns and passes and woodland paths of his making – we have all seen them before in some aspect. They come from an innate way of seeing, traversing, communing with our land and cityscapes and our cohabitants in them that, in our very plural lives, we seem to have forgotten.
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Touchstone, oil on canvas, 2000, 152 x 183 cm
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Illumination 2, (detail) oil on canvas, 2008, 123 x 137 cm
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The Man who was a Bear No 2, oil on canvas, 2011, 90.7 x 96.2 cm
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The Keeper of the Secret Flame, oil on canvas, 2014, 60 x 50 cm
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The Companions Walk, oil on canvas, 2013, 51 x 61 cm
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Woodland Queen - Titania, oil on canvas, 2010, 91.5 x 96.5 cm
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The Rumour of Light III, monoprint, 2012, 52.5 x 41 cm
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The History of the Princess, mixed media with collage, 2018, 35.5 x 43.5 cm
The State of the Game, mixed media with collage, 2018, 35.5 x 43.5 cm
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Gateway, monotype, 2018, 27 x 34.5 cm
The Spell, monotype, 2018, 27 x 34.5 cm
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Puppet Master, etching, 2018, ed 15, 20 x 25 cm
Queen of Shadow, etching, 2018, ed 15, 20 x 25 cm
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A Familiar, oil on gesso on paper, 2018, 57.5 x 51 cm
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Speaking in Starlight 2, oil on gesso on paper, 2016, 64 x 56.5 cm
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Madonna of the Ocean, oil on gesso on paper, 2018, 82 x 69 cm
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Speaking in Starlight No 6, oil on gesso on paper, 2015, 64.5 x 56 cm
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Forest Born No 5, oil on paper, 2019, 45 x 37 cm
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The End of her Forest, oil on paper, 2019, 55 x 51 cm
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Church Goer, (detail) encaustic, 2018, 16 x 20 cm
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6 Gentlemen Subjects, hand-coloured collage, 2018, 63 x 33 cm
Born and raised in Leeds, Wood studied at Leeds Polytechnic and Chelsea College of Art. In 1987 he returned to Leeds, avoiding the fashions and commercial pressures associated with the London art world at that time. Since then he has worked incessantly, developing and refining his technique and medium in the pursuit of his unique artistic vision. His working process is exhausting, and many of his hard-fought paintings are eventually destroyed in a rigorous exercise to maintain his exceptionally high artistic standards.
Catalogue produced to accompany Christopher P. Wood’s exhibition at Goldmark Gallery in June 2019. Text Š Max Waterhouse Design Porter/Goldmark ISBN 978-1-909167-66-7
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