Highlights from art exhibition opening Christopher P Wood Landscape Reimagined GOLDMARK YouTube

Wood wants us to become lost in every gestural twist and turn of his surfaces. He wants us to taste each mark with the tongue of our eye, to feel the haptic touch of each brush stroke as our gaze consumes the picture surface. He invites us to follow the quick flick of the wrist as it becomes a feather-like leaf, to notice the short staccato gestures that build a wall, or trace the languid, almost imperceptible drawing back and forth of the arm that allows long strokes of blue or grey to melt into a limpid sky. He deliberately allows us to see the twirling and twisting of the splayed soft bristles that suggest foliage and the precise line that delineates a trunk. He shows us the controlled swift strokes he uses to create a body and the soft, fleshy dab that conjures a face. But although Wood wants us to see his surfaces, he is not a modernist emphasising the nature of his paintings as objects or celebrating their physical manufacture or processes. Instead, his marks and brush strokes are there to create a space of mystery and innocent vision.