Field day

The countryside is just the starting point for Christopher Wood's striking landscapes, writes Elizabeth Mahoney.

Between the Moors and the Sea

Artist Christopher Wood lives and works between two dramatically different landscapes. Looking out from his studio, to the north the land stretches down to the flat shore, the waters edge and the beautiful beaches of East Lothian; while to the south the lush rolling hills climb up to the stark and dramatic moorland of The Lammermuirs.

His home and studio nestle in the East Lothian countryside which forms a beautiful meeting point for the two. Similarly, Wood's career can be described as a meeting of opposites. Starting out as a landscape painter after graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 1984, he began by producing canvasses which were infused with the natural forms and the scenes that surrounded him. As well as critical acclaim, prizes and awards, the loyalty of his early work to the local landscape drew comparisons with Joan Eardley's paintings of Catterline on the North East coast and William Gillies' Lothian landscapes.

At this stage, Wood's painting was poetic and lyrical as his titles hint, ' I Wandered Alone Over The Beach (Under That Moon Where She Droops Almost Down To The Sea' and 'Sweet Tremulous Days of Rain and Sun' are typical. You hardly need to see the paintings to imagine the scenes. Now the titles are shorter and sharper, for example, 'Hill Loch' and 'Red Storm', and you need to see theses oil paintings, with their impasto textures and intense colours, to appreciate their spacial energy.

He explains the new brevity quite simply. "The titles I was using became overly important in people's minds. This was finally brought home to me when I was introduced to somebody at an opening at the RSA and he began with 'Ah yes, you're the chap with the titles'. I thought, 'No I'm the chap with the paintings actually' and from then on I've preferred to keep my titles short and allow the paintings to speak for themselves." But it's not just the names which have altered. On the strength of new paintings on show at the Scottish Gallery, many would be tempted to label Wood an abstract painter. There are blocks of colour, puzzling forms, bewildering layers of shapes.

For the artist, it is less a case of moving between two irreconcilable traditions, more a natural progression in his painting process. "While my paintings are no longer topographical, for me they are still solidly grounded in Nature. They have to be. The meaning of a painting is now more about emotional responses, 'process' and feelings, but their inspiration and visual vocabulary still come from the land, from the same areas of East Lothian and other places I feel I know well. But I no longer go out to paint. I don't set an easel up in the fields and draw what I see anymore." This is partly due to his familiarity with the landscape, having been based in East Lothian for 15 years and absorbing enough to work solely from memory and the imagination. But it's also a result of heavy weather in Provence a few years ago, which forced him to change his approach.

"I was working there for three months and it rained all the time. Because of the conditions, I couldn't actually paint much outside and had to nip out between downpours to make quick sketches before returning to my studio. Because of this I was forced to work up these sketches into finished paintings in the studio, which of course is quite a different pursuit to working 'en plain air' as I was used to. At the time of course I was still trying to work in quite a realistic way, but because I was forced to work so much indoors with only my sketches to go on, I found I had to use my visual memory and my imagination more and more. This also coincided with my being introduced to the work of Nicholas de Stael by an artist friend who lives in France.

"When I came back and had my show, my earlier work seemed to me to be merely paintings of places and things. I remember quite vividly thinking there was more of interest in the colours and textures of my palette than there was in much of the work on the walls. It might sound strange, but I began then to try to marry the un-selfconscious beauty of my palette with the visual language I used in describing a scene.

"In Wood's studio it's easy to see what he means. There are swirls of oil paint, arranged in rows, one gorgeous colour upstaged by the next. If the early paintings were largely concerned with recording the natural landscapes, these new works are adventures in paint informed by that same landscape. "Most of my work involves layer upon layer of paint. Each is allowed time to dry before being scratched and scraped and layered again with more paint, before being set aside, while the focus moves to another canvas. Thus the finished painting is built up over time.

"I've been using transparent glazes more and more. By using very strongly pigmented paint scraped really hard across the canvas, all the textures in the layers below can once again be shown. I love paint. I love the 'stuff' of it. I love playing around with it."

Wood's studio is crammed with canvasses, some almost complete, and some in the early stages. A store room contains hundreds more which he selects from for over-painting and reworking. A number of the new paintings have been made in this way, with only the merest trace of the earlier composition visible.

The whole studio can, at times, be given over to work in progress, with each canvas being worked up over five or six different periods. "I have no idea where the painting will go and I'm always happy when I surprise myself. I spend a great deal of time listening to each canvas to divine it's particular voice. I turn it around, upside down, thinking,'what the hell is that?'. Eventually, I begin to see what the painting could be. "It's chaotic, it's improvisational, and I enjoy that," he says, with a beam.

The finished paintings are anything but chaotic and the strong relationship with surrounding landscape is still present. In the majestic 'Between The Moors And The Sea', for all its play with paint, swathes of deep blue mark the sea and sky, and the sun shines down. The fertile land by the shore is suggested by patches and cubes of colour. Further back, wide expanses of uncluttered, less busy and highly textured canvas demarcate the higher, wilder moor land.

"Between The Moors and The Sea' is about living here in East Lothian", Wood explains."My girlfriend and I were thinking of buying a house in West Lothian but every time we came back here, we realised we didn't want to leave. So it's about this place. It's not topographical. There are no 'views' you could find round here, but it nevertheless encompasses, for me, the 'idea' of living here. These days I start off with paint and work my way back to nature."

©Elizabeth Mahoney, Scotland on Sunday, June 1999