Christopher Wood's East Lothian studio...

is set between the moors and the sea and his creative imagination feeds off these elemental sources to produce lyrical responses. His style, influenced by Philipson and Eardley, moves ever closer to the abstraction of Nicholas de Stael. This is evident in two fine small works at the RSA and even more emphatic in a show of 30 canvases which has just opened at the Vicarage Cottage Gallery, North Shields. His titles, like Sweet Tremulous Days Of Rain and Sun and The Far and Flowerless Fields of Ice, might seem to be trying to do to much of the work if his paintings were not, in themselves, charged with such poetic expression. Beyond handling texture and colour in the best traditions of the Edinburgh school, and observing the true lie of the land and mood of the sea, he manages to suggest that on the right day he can paint the wind and the smell of flowers in a meadow.

© W Gordon Smith
The Scotland on Sunday, Spectrum Magazine, 1st May 1994

This Wild And Spendthrift Breeze
©1992