THIS LIFE After a difficult year dominated by cancer in his family, abstract painter Christopher Wood is finally holding his first big show in Glasgow Text by Barry Didcock Photograph © Peter Sandground Download this article as pdf (3MB)

“With two small children my day always starts the same way: the kids get up at 7am and we make breakfast. My wife works in Edinburgh so she heads off soon after that and I get the kids ready. They’re both in nursery full time and I get them there for 8.30am. So I’m a nine-to-five painter now. That was difficult to begin with, and took some getting used to. The children restrict my work time, of course, but they give me so much pleasure and I’ve found that having them has been quite an amazing experience for me. It has plugged me into the continuum of my own family and made me much more aware of, well, mortality I suppose. In a sense that’s really what has inspired me in my new work. This has been a very difficult year for me. I started working for my new show 18 months ago and that was just after my daughter was born. Then, at the beginning of this year, my step-mother got cancer and had to have a mastectomy. Then in June my mother got cancer and died. And all through this I’ve been working on the paintings, so they have a much more personal, internal subject matter now because everything that happens in my life eventually seems to find its way into the work. It’s not like I sit down and decide I’m going to make a painting about my mother, but there are things that I look at afterwards where I can see that that’s what they’re about. I went to school in Edinburgh, then to Edinburgh College of Art and I moved out to East Lothian in 1984. So I’ve lived here all my adult life. I always wanted to be a painter because that was what I always enjoyed doing. My mum would get out an old cardboard box and my brothers and I would just sit round the table and draw. I was always good at it, but I didn’t have any idea what it meant to be a painter or even what a painter really did. At one point in my teens I wanted to be a graphic designer because one of my teachers said that’s what I should be. So I went to college to do graphic design and illustration but didn’t enjoy it. In the end I changed to drawing and painting. And since then I haven’t stopped working as a painter. It’s what I’ve always done and what I always will do. We live in a very large, late-Georgian house in Dunbar and I’m very fortunate because my studio is the old drawing room on the first floor. It has windows on three sides, which is too much light for me – I have the shutters on one window permanently closed because I can’t see what I’m doing for reflections. My studio’s very messy. There’s work all over the place and round the walls are shelves of canvases in various stages of completion. I usually end up working in a very large room with an eight-foot square island in the middle. My son, Max, was supposed to be born in my studio. That was the plan. He was due in the middle of the January so after New Year I tidied and cleaned the studio to prepare for the home birth. In the end he was two weeks overdue and had to be induced in hospital. But because I hadn’t been able to use smelly oil paints in the studio while we were waiting, I’d started experimenting with different media, using collage and bits of torn canvas. At one point I put down a large canvas on the floor and painted it and when I got the painting back out and had a look at it I was taken aback by it and realised it was finished. It was the first abstract painting I’d ever done. Generally, however loose my work has been, I would have to read it in terms of a landscape or a seascape for me to have a sense of whether or not it was finished. So I’ve been working like that ever since and Glasgow Art Club is the first big show I’ve had. There are around 50 paintings, so it’s been a lot of work. When I get into the studio the first thing I do is check my emails. Then I’ll get down to work: painting. My wife’s always telling me I need to eat. She’ll say ‘Did you have lunch?’ and I’ll say ‘No, I forgot.’ I just work, even when the muse hasn’t struck. Then at 5pm the kids come back and from 5pm until they go to bed at 7pm it’s full-on madness. There’s meals, baths, stories. Max usually wants three stories and I’ll give him two so there’s always a battle over that. Then in the evening my wife and I will relax for a bit. Then it’s time for bed. In the last couple of months I often can’t sleep because I’m thinking about painting. So I’ll get back up and go back through to the studio and look at the work I’ve been doing. I don’t often paint at night, though, just look. And I never dream about painting. Thank God. That would be too much.” Christopher Wood’s solo exhibition is showing at the Glasgow Art Club, 185 bath Street, Glasgow until October 21. Log on to www.christopherwood.co.uk for more info INTERVIEW BY BARRY DIDCOCK PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER SANDGROUND 08 October 2006 Download this article as pdf (3MB) link to feature on Sunday Herald online (opens in new window) ©Peter Sandground