Christopher P. Wood’s Brothers Grimm Art | GOLDMARK

Red Riding Rose Rose Red Riding Hood A little girl being good Red Hood Riding Rose To visit Gran, she goes Red Rose Hood Riding The wolf's in disguise It's no good her hiding She can see in his eyes Rose Hood Riding Red Wolf down, both were But the wolf stays dead To a huntsman after fur In one film, an SS man Saves the girl and Gran While the wolves are due Or them Or me Or you Looks like the trolls have had some pumpkin They live under that bridge there They're not often seen but here's the evidence that they exist The thing about bridges is in folktales they're traditionally liminal zones They cross over water and roads Because of that the membrane between this and that and the other world is very very thin and traditionally one of the beings that inhabit the underneath of bridges are trolls I think I better move on quickly I've outstayed my welcome and I think the troll's still hungry I'm Christopher Wood I'm a painter, artist, etcher sometimes writer, sometimes composer and a great devotee of the Grimm's Fairy Tales I think it was Chris's idea first to reimagine the tales of the Brothers Grimm He was in need of a project something to sink his teeth into and he'd long been interested in their stories Red Riding Hood in particular The Brothers Grimm were two brothers Jacob and Wilhelm who lived in 19th century Germany They were interested in the German language and what they did was they went and they collected folk stories, myths, tales from the people and published them for the first time Many of these stories are now part of the public conscious You know them as Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots They're stories that have been tackled by people like Arthur Rackham, David Hockney, Walt Disney So there was plenty for Chris to really engage with here I used to do this when I was a kid I don't know whether I've got the balance for it now The Grimm's Fairy Stories would be a perfect vehicle for me to draw all the different kind of aspects of the work that I make from paintings, etchings, graphic works in general and collage So that was one of the underlying reasons for entering into this very, very long project to go a bit more thoroughly into the Grimm's stories to do more research and to become more familiar with the sort of occult nature of the stories Yeah, it's been very interesting going into it so deeply rather than the sort of superficial way in which the sort of Disney-ization of the tales has sort of infiltrated sort of common consciousness But actually when you get back to the original tales and see them in the context of their own time they are very dark and profound oddly ambivalent about the morals which is the most extraordinary thing And most of them end fairly mysteriously almost inconclusively Really that's where Ian and I's conversation began with the sort of the underlying occult imagery and the contrariness of the stories and the light of the dark of them My name's Ian Doohicke and I write poetry mainly Very interested in all of the things all of the things that surround the Grimm's stories It's been very inspirational working with Chris on this project The idea of Red Riding Hood has interested me for quite a long time I've always associated it in my mind with something disturbing You know, long before I researched the material that we were looking at for this exhibition and found out that for example the SS made a version of Red Riding Hood in 1942 I think where her red cloak has a swastika on it and somehow the association between Red Riding Hood and who does the killing is blurred, you know And it's a sort of rite of passage isn't it because she walks into the woods innocent and comes out really having gone through the whole gamut of kind of emotions that adults go through you know, from the enacted death and being swallowed by the wolf only to be resurrected by the woodcutter That's it, a rebirth and you know, very specifically it seems to me with those associations So Red Riding is one of the key stories throughout The Grimms for me And we thought character of The Grimms was fairly suited to the character of the people of Leeds Oh absolutely And also there was a mysterious side to Leeds' heritage as well There are stories you never hear anywhere else So for example a unique Leeds version of the story of the wild hunt And in Leeds they say that's the souls of unbaptised children flying around the eaves of their parents' houses And magic was very important in the Leeds Arts Club It all seems to me part of the same of richness, inventiveness Art was also somewhere behind it The unexplainable and indeed horror Because it was a largely Jewish area it came in with kind of Jewish mysticism as well Yeah, the Kabbalah The Kabbalah, yeah It is, it's unusually mixed and rich in its folklore I think Yeah, I agree I mean in the wood that Chris walks in every day and I walk in as often as I can It's again, it's beautiful It's ancient woodland But by the same token a few years ago the corpse of a drug dealer was found and his corpse was discovered by schoolchildren as well on their way to school So that connection between children and violence and woods was exactly where we spend a lot of our time you know, and fed our inspiration I think Yeah, and corpses Which is a very grim sort of symbol, isn't it? Yeah, it's all played out in front of us in contemporary terms I was vaguely thinking of calling it Grimms up north, you know Traditional Yorkshire mortuary rhyme One for infanticide Two for a thief Three for poverty Four for grief Five for hunger Six for gloom Seven for a coffin in a silent room Eight for pine wood Nine, no good Ten for a killer in a bright red hood Eleven, no heaven Twelve, cold hell Thirteen, cursing with a witch's spell Fourteen, courting Fifteen, wed Sixteen, parents Seventeen, dead Eighteen, buried Nineteen, forgot Twenty, plenty Of that's your lot Poetry is very, very important because it's always about the space between the lines and the space between the words and the inference of phrases and the rhythm They invoke a kind of feeling Poetry is almost a secret language Kind of let the poem have its own life and let the poem's feelings settle upon your spirit Through the looking-glass A mother's greed for Rampian Cost her her daughter That daughter, her freedom She of lovely locks Locked inside a tower A prince is blinded Throwing himself from into thorns When told he had lost her Like a princess throwing away a sea hare But Rapunzel's story doesn't end there Campanula Rapunculis In an old Calabrian tale A young girl uproots this To find a palace there well That winds as deep as this I dreamt it as a land where A Persephone or Annalis May meet you on its stair Or Rapunzel's Enchantress In a moonstar gown there A world turned upside down Back to front and inside out Like our artist's hometown Where Rampian may sprout Under some moonstar gown Nothing seriously monstrous to report from underneath this bridge On close inspection it seems to be troll-free Having said that I'm not going to hang around too often This is a relatively new bridge but I still think it could harbour a few magical things When you see the beauty of these woods you can understand what drew Turner and Goethe in here and many other artists Yeah it's a great resource to have five minutes from the studio But it always seems very strange and very magical place And I say look at that dead tree there I reckon that tree might come down in the winter storms this year and when it comes down its roots are going to turn everything up they'll turn the little stream there it might even crash down into the road but there's such kind of violent potential there in nature It's always wondrous down here and such a cathedral it's a beautiful canopy and there are some seriously beautiful trees in this wood and some incredible specimens and they're kind of like people I know And here we are back at the studio another magical place Right at the moment I'm working on some small oil sketches and the first thing with paint is the medium that you use so the oil paint comes in standard forms but the medium with which you mix the paint is equally if not more important and over the years there are lots of different kinds of mediums which have been invented and my medium is based on a Renaissance recipe which is called liquid glass and is a medium which you sort of mix and then paint into the canvas So I've got a secret ingredient which I'm not going to tell you about and then I've got safflower oil and then I've got some pure turps then I've got some cobalt dryers shake it together and this will impart a slight sort of eggshell sheen to keep the vibrancy of the paint and I want the paint to do the business of my eyes and my imagination for me so I don't want to have the paint so descriptive that every leaf on every tree is seen I want to give the impression of every leaf as it's seen on every tree you know I'm talking about in technical terms but it's done very unconsciously it's done by eye as well and painting for me is rather like sort of sculpting in clay you know you start off with these kind of broad shapes and then slowly they become more and more refined Yeah well I've always had a really close connection with the Mercer Gallery because I had my first real big retrospective here in 1999 over to 2000 and so I've always had a very very strong connection with the space and in fact it's a gallery which is very close to my heart well shall we go in because we can start with Red Riding Hood which has been a theme of a lot of my work for over two decades and Red Riding particularly has always interested me because of this strange relationship between all the characters the woodcutter that sort of ambivalent presence in the wood the wolf who seems sort of in a sense innocent but praying to his own wolf-like nature and Red Riding herself who is enormously kind of but stupidly courageous just going into the wood wearing a red cape so she could be seen by anybody who would be lingering there so the wolf I often see as a kind of symbol of all those things that hide in the woods that we're all still afraid of that come to haunt our imaginations well if you go through we could have a look at Sleeping Beauty which is another of the sort of key stories the original folk tale is extremely dark but he really has to explain the date raping yeah you know part of that tale so it's far from the Disney version of it you know One Day My Prince Will Come and all of that it's a much sort of more explicit and darker tale in its original form but again it's interesting over the years how those forms have become more sort of digestible but we've also got The Seven Ravens and Puss in Boots and The Seven Ravens particularly is perhaps a well-known story the seven brothers are turned into ravens by the evil conjurer the sister finds out that the ravens are caught in a glass mountain so the stars then tell her that she can open the door using a little finger as long as it's been chopped from her hand so you've got this again macabre self-sacrifice in which this girl cuts her little finger off which then puts into the door of the glass mountain and frees the seven ravens, her brothers it's interesting to look at the surrealist dimension here in an exhibition where there are more straightforwardly surrealist works to draw that out of it and one of the richnesses of the Grimm stories is that there are many possible readings of events within them and indeed they go beyond good and evil seeing the work and seeing all these sort of different aspects of what I do all drawn together under the theme of the Grimm's is really kind of fulfilling it's all to come together extremely well but better than I could have hoped for and there's a wonderful catalogue and beautiful poems by Ian here that have all come to sort of frame what I feel about the Grimm's fairy stories and how contemporary they still remain after nearly 200 years or more I've learned a great deal from working with Chris both with Chris as an artist but also the Grimm's themselves thinking about them more deeply than I had in the past I knew the Grimm stories in a general sense but I didn't look at them in detail I didn't look at the stories where they fitted into a general cultural context and all of that has been borne in on me by the exhibition preparing for the exhibition writing the catalogue talking with Chris talking with everybody really and it's terrific and I think that people who come to the exhibition as well as appreciating the art I think they will learn too I think they will take away a lot from this exhibition It's very typical of the sort of Grimm's that they leave you to ponder on and to meditate on what the meaning of the story might be They're quite surreal in that ambivalence aren't they with respect to the dramatic conclusion of these stories and they all live happily ever after