Christopher P. Wood | Exhibition Walkthrough 2026

It's been a busy few years for the artist Christopher P. Wood since his last exhibition here at the Goldmark Gallery. The last couple of years have been spent on a monumental project reimagining the tales of the Brothers Grimm for an exhibition that toured the north of England from the Mercer Art Gallery at Harrogate to Scarborough. The paintings that make up this latest show here at Goldmark, all of them oil paintings, are a mixture of different landscape views and they are a kind of summary of Chris's art to this date. In fact the subtitle for this show is Stages on a Long Journey and it's a particularly appropriate title taken from one series of paintings in the show. This year marks Chris's 40th as a practicing, exhibiting, professional artist. It's also the year of his 65th birthday and 20 years ago was when he was first introduced to us here at Goldmark. So the paintings in this show are a kind of representation of that relationship over the last 20 years but more importantly of a career that has been dedicated to a particular kind of vision. When I look around at the paintings around me in this exhibition they remind me of childhood days spent walking around art museums with my mum, particularly places like the National Gallery, and I remember looking at these great big mythological paintings of characters from Greek and Roman mythology cavorting through the forests of these strange escarpments, these wooded areas, and I remember looking at these great big paintings and wondering where the artist had been to find this strange setting. Where was this place? Where did it exist in the world? These vast and sublime landscapes they had found and painted. It was only years later that I realised that for many years landscapes in paintings were totally a product of the imagination. They were conjured from the artist's mind. They were brought together from very close observation of the real world but they were settings almost like a stage for the actions that were in their paintings and that actually landscape painting as a genre was fairly low down, with some exceptions, the kind of hierarchy, the rung of the art establishment right up until the 19th century. It's only really in this country in particular with artists like Constable and Turner that really looking at and reflecting the landscape around us has become central to our art and that's a tradition that Chris finds himself in. In fact round the corner from me are a series of small paintings called The Shore and Mysteries. They're named after that location where Samuel Palmer, William Blake and the ancients would meet, they would talk about art and they would conjure this kind of visionary idea, this idyllic idea of an Arcadian landscape that looked back to the times of the ancient Greeks and beyond. In fact so much of British painting of the last hundred years has been about our landscape, about that very tradition that goes back to Blake and Palmer. We think of the Neoromantic school, artists of a great variety of styles and inclinations looking to the landscape around us, the changing landscape particularly in those post-war years and how it might reflect the kind of psychological torments, crises and elations that we have ourselves. All of that you will find in Chris's work but you won't find any of the landscapes that you see in these paintings out there in the real world. Although they have captured elements of the Gledhower Valley woods that surround his home up in Leeds, although there are elements of the Yorkshire Dales in some of these paintings, they are works that are entirely conjured from the imagination. It's partly one derived from the way that Chris works and in a way this goes right back to those grand mythological paintings I was talking about. Chris has a wet into wet or alla primo style of oil painting where each painting is completed more or less in one sitting, so that the whole surface of the oil paint dries in one session. What that means is that the paintings that you see around us, oils on canvas, some of them on prepared paper with beautiful gesso grounds, is that they are a kind of improvisation. There is an element of discovery in the moment in Chris's work that picks up on sort of surrealist tradition, on a kind of magical way of thinking about painting and there is a sense that when he's beginning a new series of work that anything might emerge from the landscape as it builds in front of him. When I look around this exhibition and I see these paintings produced, all of them in the last three or four years, there is a great variety in the kind of landscapes that we see, the kind of textures and tones and colours that we find. Some sort of relate to these wonderful large rounded mountains that almost remind me of Chinese landscape painting. It's worth reminding that while landscape painting was not particularly thought of much in Western painting in the 15th, 16th centuries, in China, in Asia it had been a major tradition, a major part of their art for many years before. I see elements of a kind of older mythological world emerging here, grand kind of vistas that remind me a little bit of The Odyssey, these kind of islands, these rocky cliffs that are sort of conjured from old Greek mythology, Greek poetry. There are elements also of that kind of sublime tradition of Blake and Palmer. There's a beautiful, almost a skyscape actually, in the corner of this room with a kind of misty angel just sort of appearing among the clouds and of course clouds are a prominent part in Chris's art. They are almost like the kind of cloud studies that you find in Constable, these wonderful rolling, roiling bodies of storm clouds, these beautiful puffs of cumulonimbus just sort of wafting across the sky. There is a sense in all of these paintings that we've kind of stumbled upon an imaginary world where anything is possible and what Chris has done is kind of set the stage for our own imagination to start drawing stories out to kind of read ourselves and feel ourselves in this world that he's conjured for us. You can sense looking around some of these landscape paintings that Chris is incredibly learned when it comes to his art historical knowledge, his background and indeed he has given lectures at places like the National Gallery, for the Royal Academy, he's been a teacher and a visiting lecturer at many different universities but there is no kind of imposition in his paintings, there is no sense of him trying to get across a particular message or to convey a particular kind of part of one tradition or another. There is a feeling in these landscapes, a kind of lightness of many years of working through the kind of hard work of being an artist, of finding that particular kind of vision and that this is really the culmination of it. They're paintings that are still and inviting, they have a kind of beautiful veiled quality to them. When you get up close you can really see how he has worked through the textures of the oil paint, the way that he's in some of these paintings scraped back so that you get the tooth of the canvas coming through playing its own part in the work but also as you start to step back all of these little technical moments, these little brush marks suddenly conjure a world that feels very tangible and real and that really draws on what is at the heart of Chris's practice which is that art is both about the real, the physical, the tangible, the things that we see every day and it's merging with the incredible possibilities of the mind, the potential, the imagined. They're paintings that are lit by this extraordinary sense of light and when I look across the skies here a beautiful range of blues, greys, greens coming out of these canvases. They're works that really to be done justice, to really feel that sense of their hovering around the tangible, intangible line need to be seen in person. This exhibition will be running over the course of summer for the next four or five weeks so if you can do please come visit us here at the gallery, come and see these beautiful paintings for yourself. They are of course available online and do get in touch if you'd like to buy something. For now though I must leave you with this extraordinary milestone exhibition of landscapes, Stages on a Long Journey by Christopher Pimlott.