Ian Duhig illuminates Wood’s latest project: tackling the ever-relevant tales of the Brothers Grimm
I first met Christopher P. Wood under slightly magical circumstances after he responded to my disembodied voice in the Yorkshire aether. I knew of him not only as an artist, but also as the man who had helped rescue the work of another Leeds artist, the reclusive Joash Woodrow, toward the end of his life when he was about to be sectioned after a fire at his home – Wood brought his work to the attention of galleries including the one that would eventually represent Woodrow. I mentioned him on a BBC Radio 3 episode of The Essay and Wood got in touch. He lived nearby, invited me to visit and I found him, his ideas and his work very inspirational when I did. We have collaborated on several art projects since.
Red Riding, monotype, 2024A term used for Joash in a review might apply to Wood as well, ‘insider/outsider artist’, one who is very aware of contemporary art, acquainted with its territory but working beyond its immediate borders and agendas. Like Joash, Wood had come down from Leeds and been involved with London's art scene but returned – in Wood’s case to grow his work again from its roots. During our discussions, he observed that it was simply too easy to be an artist in London, or at least to call yourself one and not be challenged, whereas Loiners (as Leeds citizens are called) were less impressed by the label you gave yourself, wanting proof that what you do is worthwhile. Furthermore, Leeds wasn’t ‘petty’ in Wood’s phrase, which reminded me of Yeats extolling his own citizenry to the Irish Senate: ‘We are no petty people’.
For all Leeds’ supposed down-to-earth hard-headedness, its heritage includes unique mix of many-stranded other-worldly traditions – Urbs Leodiensis Mystica, I have described it elsewhere. The city’s version of the Gabriel Hounds, for example, as opposed to elsewhere makes its Wild Hunt sound that of unbaptised children’s souls roaring about their parent’s gables. We should not divorce these concerns from Modernism either: Peter Riley commented in the The Fortnightly Review how reading Robert Duncan ‘makes you realise how important occultism was to the whole of Modernist poetical writing, and a lot of other writing from the 1880s onwards’. Leeds Arts Club’s interest in European progressive art and Theosophy was fed by Masonic connections of a distinctly Yeatsian flavour – the Golden Dawn Lodge he was so influential in Yorkshire it opened its second branch in nearby Bradford, bringing its ‘compelling synthesis of Rosicrucianism, Kabbalah, Enochian magic, alchemy and mysticism, going on to become one of the most significant forces in the Victorian occult revival’ (Roberts, Old Elmet Dreaming). Leeds Arts Club invited Yeats over with his mystical theatre and it was a huge success, as Foster’s biography of him documents. While such activities engaged the bourgeoisie, working-class enthusiasm for the city’s rag wells here was condemned as papish superstition – but footballers remain notoriously superstitious: in 1971 Leeds United manager Don Revie hired a gypsy to lift a curse on their ground. Research conducted by Huddersfield University in 2016 still found a greater propensity in Yorkshire to believe in covens of witches than elsewhere. The great Yorkshire poet Ted Hughes was deeply interested in magic and his Elmet poems were inspired by this area’s Celtic heritage. Alan Bennett in his Diaries noted that, while elsewhere to say someone is ‘roaring’ implies with laughter: in Leeds it means they are in floods of tears. This is a city where the Grimms’ tales fit the temperament like one of its Burton’s suits.
Sleeping Beauty II, etching with aquatint, carborundum & handcolouring, 2024
Despite his attachment to his hometown, Wood has broad intellectual horizons. He told me one reason he preferred to working with the Grimms’ tales over classical alternatives suggested to him was that the tales have no specific location: generic forests and clearings are conjured up along with symbolic towers and wells, the odd cottage or hovel – sketchy backdrops sufficient for each story, much as specified in Beckett’s stage sets. As in Beckett, they suggest an existential wilderness for the background to their narratives, lending a universality to their scenes which allows Wood to respond in his own creative terms, seeming to allude to Eliotic waste lands at one moment, in the next to archetypical mountains like those Giotto painted from rocks he kept in his studio.
Wood takes great care in marrying his medium to his chosen subject matter: the Sleeping Beauty’s peaceful state seemed to call for the flow of paint while forest scenes, in their world of flickering light and darkness, required starker contrasts. He handles collage in a unique style but with an acute awareness of its implications: Wood’s technique collages time and space in repurposing material, as the Grimms’ editing and representation of folk material made tradition new, which Ezra Pound urged poets to do. Collage has been a central Modernist technique in poetry from Eliot through to Prynne (see the latter’s The Oval Window), whose early work was published by the Leeds poet John Riley. Wood explicitly linked The Water of Life, a lesser-known Grimms tale, to Eliot’s The Waste Land and the Grail legends. Distinguishing his own approach, Wood has written ‘Collage could traditionally be better understood as a tasteful arrangement of ephemera, but I prefer to use only precious, unique materials’ (Christopher P.Wood: An Innocent Vision, R. Davey p.107). These materials include fragments – those other Modernist touchstones – from paintings, drawings and prints of the ‘greats’ donated by the Goldmark Gallery or unearthed elsewhere. Borges suggested that ‘every writer creates their own predecessors’ but Wood’s artistic predecessors’ creations may have an embodied part of his present art.
The Lonely Tower, oil on gesso on paper, 2024
Wood employs oil painting to transcendental effect and indeed it was initially used for Buddhist religious art in seventh-century Afghanistan. It was brought to new heights in northern Europe, particularly among those once called the ‘Flemish Primitives’. It soon spread to Renaissance Italy, where Vasari had not only coined the term ‘Renaissance’ but also ‘Gothic’ – although he considered the latter essentially barbarian art. Wood takes a meticulously complex approach to the preparation of his oils, sometimes working quickly with liquid glass, though his finishing process takes much longer to ensure the longevity of his final versions. In this and other ways, time seems frozen in Wood’s work, something like Faulkner’s vision of it in his Requiem for a Nun: ‘The past is never dead. It's not even past.’ While Faulkner exemplifies US Southern Gothic literature, Wood’s European Gothic-inflected work has a freshness and immediacy that makes his world of the Grimms entirely contemporary.
The Water of Life, monotype & collage, 2024
Wood is an expert printmaker, unsurprisingly given the importance of William Blake to his vision, as are also Leeds printmakers Norman Ackroyd and Fred Cecil Jones, alongside Richmond’s Cuitt the Younger. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake wrote 'Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.' The contrary nature of this artistic technique is characterised aptly by Jules Heller in his Printmaking Today: ‘The printmaker is a most peculiar being. He delights in deferred gratification and in doing what does not come naturally. He takes pleasure in working backward or in opposites: the gesture that produces a line of force moving to the right prints to the left, and vice versa . . . Left is right. Right is left. Backward is forward.’ I spoke often with Wood about Celtic otherworlds whose doors may be water or mirrors – we live on the site of the ancient Brittonnic Celtic kingdom of Elmet as noted – and he is very knowledgeable about folklores and belief systems concerning such parallel universes including Gnostic ideas, which so influenced Blake – his ‘old Nobodaddy aloft’ resembled the Gnostic Demiurge, powerful in a world not merely fallen but unsaveable, an evil trap. Much as Orthodox Christian Churches employ paradox to suggest the unknowable nature of God, early Gnostics did the same in their teachings, often for shock effect— recasting Eden’s serpent a liberator, bringing the gnosis to Adam and Eve, Judas as the favourite disciple of Jesus or, in The Second Treatise of the Great Seth (found with the Nag Hammadi library), having Jesus laugh at His supposed crucifixion where Simon of Cyrene dies in his place and so on. Wood is also interested in Jung’s use of the ancient Gnostic texts, and how Jung moved beyond Gnostic dualism to seek the possibility of the coincidence of opposites allowed for in alchemical theory. This was popular among Renaissance scholars and later thinkers including Blake and Eastern mystical traditions, such as expounded in China’s 17th century CE Taoist text, The Secret of the Golden Flower with its concept of ‘neidan’, or ‘inner alchemy’.
The Uncovered, etching with hand-colour, 2024
Leeds is a contrarian, paradoxical place itself in several senses. Patrick Nuttgens’s study of its urban development was titled Leeds: the Back to Front, Inside-Out, Upside-Down City which is literally true of its changes but I think symbolically true as well. It is a town where opposites coincide, embodying contraries in a way that would please Blake: bright and gloomy, reputedly philistine while rich in creativity, possessing a history of bigotry but also of housing migrants and refugees; its citizens considered phlegmatic and surly, yet now having a reputation for Dionysian excess (‘You spell LEEDS with LSD and a couple of Es’ in the ravers’ joke). Leeds was also known for violence, reflected in the books of ‘the William Faulkner of the M62’, as David Annand described David Peace recently in the TLS. Martin Bell’s poems expressed his fear of its casual violence, writing in The City of Dreadful Something ‘Why, Leeds is Hell, nor am I out of it./Why, I am Hell, nor is Leeds out of it’. Fellow poet, John Riley, who lived near Wood and I, was beaten to death in a local beauty spot in what at the time was considered by some as a case of ‘queer-bashing’. Riley was involved with Prynne in the early days of what we now call the Cambridge school, differing from its members’ general tastes in his devotion to love and religious poetry. Riley was baptised into the Russian Orthodox Church and employed its via negativa theology in his writing where light was an overarching divine image with figures before a window a common device, as in Hopper’s paintings. In Riley’s later poetry, the page seems almost a window lit from behind, as Debussy described the scoring of Parsifal, a spiritual light burning away superfluous words, as Wood’s space burns away unnecessary marks and lines.
Red Riding, The Woodcutter and Grandma, collage, 2024
Taken through seven editions between 1812 to the so-called definitive version of 1857, the Grimms’ fairy tales reduced the sexual content of their sources’ versions while increasing their levels of violence. They never intended these stories to be read by children, so when Wood’s images based on The Sea Hare depict the host of suitors murdered by the Princess scattered about like dismembered toys, it is entirely in keeping with the Grimms’ manner. I very much admired Richard Davey’s monograph on Wood mentioned earlier which was subtitled An Innocent Vision, though I’m not sure how innocent Wood’s vision is in his Grimms sequences so much as looking beyond Christian conceptions good and evil, which so exercised Nietzsche, to capture the essence of Grimms’ style. We might remember that fellow alumni from the local comprehensive school Wood attended include Damien Hirst and Marcus Harvey, whose portrait of Myra Hindley based on her mugshot using prints made with casts of a child’s hand caused such a furore during the Sensation YBA exhibition in 1997.
J.M.W. Turner, another important influence on Wood, painted in the valley where he walks daily. It is very lovely, a swathe of ancient oak woodland rich in varieties of flora and fauna – but it is also where a young drug-dealer’s body was found by schoolchildren a few years ago and where there was more recently a machete fight between dealers in broad daylight. The area is called Gledhow, meaning ‘Kite Hill’, and those scavengers of corpses (a gallows was sited on an adjacent hill), still fly above this valley. Wood can allow dark themes into his art without resorting to sensationalism or histrionic gestures, rather seeing them as with Riley’s light eternally flowing into its yin-yang opposite, in a poised yet dynamic balance, like the play of brightness and darkness through the tree canopy and crown shyness of Gledhow Valley Woods.
Sister of the Ravens, monoprint & collage, 2024
The Grimms enjoyed a fruitful twenty years in Prussia at the King’s invitation, and many of Wood’s Grimm works are made with numinous Prussian Blue. Sometimes called Saxon Blue, it has its own occult pedigree: the colour derives from Saxony’s porcelain industry, itself the product of research involving would-be alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger. Böttger was diverted from his Rumpelstiltskin goal for Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony, toward his supervisor Tschirnhaus’ experiments in making porcelain, so popular by that date it was worth more by weight than gold. Wood’s sensibility is sympathetic to that of this Gothic European North as we have noted; he once said during our interviews he feels that while the classical tradition involves divinities separate from, and superior to, humanity, rendered by their artists in marble, metal and stone, Gothic deities emerge from within us and can be truly represented in wood with all its knotty twists and turns, reminding us of Kant’s remark ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight can be made’.
Grimms Landscape, collage, 2024
‘Every sickness is a musical problem, every cure a musical solution’ wrote Novalis (trans. Auden). Leeds was an early centre for the goth music scene. It suited the city’s character, though it couldn’t be said to have influenced the music Wood writes, his forthcoming album Amelodia being an example: it uses recordings from local birdsong or London street characters in the manner of his gallery friend Gavin Bryars are tightly-layered like the grain on oak or locally-quarried stone, with experimental acoustic and electronic music, highly-reworked to a contemplative finish yet often laced with menace, drawing on influences from part song to Erik Satie, Lili Boulanger and Charles Koechlin to minimalism and the folk music of these islands. The breadth of Wood’s creative activities allow him to realise his Grimms sequence with atmospheric harmonics surrounding our immediate exhibition experience, like the white space around the words of a poem.
Why devote so much artistic attention to the Grimms’ Tales and interpretations of them at this time? The Brothers Grimm: A Biography by Ann Schmiesling was published by Yale University Press this year, the first major English-language one in over fifty years, and its deep research has galvanised study of their lives and achievement. Folklore generally is also enjoying a vogue: six decades on from its inauguration, the Survey of Language and Folklore is being updated by the Centre for Contemporary Legend at Sheffield Hallam University which is to conduct a new National Folklore Survey. However, as the folklorist and historian Francis Young wrote in his substack recently that while ‘folklore holds a particularly important place in British culture – perhaps more so than at any time since the 1970s’ people ignore its dark side: ‘We need to confront the fact that folklore gives access to the worst of human nature – our desire to control, to dominate, to exact revenge. It has justified murder, rape, child abuse, and oppression . . . Folklore emerged, more often than not, from the claustrophobic, controlling communities of the agrarian pre-modern world. It is rich, deep, complex, paradoxical – but also, sometimes, downright nasty.’ The Grimms’ darkness harmonises with our zeitgeist where folk horror has become a global artistic strategy for exploring everything from the legacy of colonialism and racism through elder and child abuse to the immigration crisis and beyond.
Puss in Boots, etching with hand-colour, 2024
Furthermore, the brothers were heavily involved in the politics of their day, nationalist upheavals that in time would lead to their books being treated with great suspicion by the Allied commanders at the end of WWII, who felt they contributed to a dark Teutonic well the Nazis drew upon – if blaming them for this is akin to blaming Wagner’s music or Nietzsche’s philosophy for the Nazi appropriation and misuse of them. The Jew Among Thorns is as shocking now as passages Luther, Bach or Simone Weil in displaying naked antisemitism. The Grimms depict a world like Christianity’s where supernatural power governs human lives, just not necessarily always for good, as Young argues, or where what seems signalled to us as good in a tale does not coincide with our idea of it. When that happens, the disturbance we feel is analogous to that of a character in one of the tales, perhaps the poor mother in The Rose, for whom that beautiful flower comes to mean something hellish.
The Happy Return, collage, 2024
There are aspects of German political and cultural history that help put this in context. Wolfram Von Eschenbach’s Grail in his Parzifal (an important source for Wagner’s Parsifal) is a stone fallen from Heaven, the Lapsit Exillis, having features in common with the Kaaba’s black stone in Mecca. Parzifal is given an equally-chivalrous Muslim half-brother, Feirefiz, whose skin is likened to writing on parchment or magpie plumage, yin-yang black and white as part of a balanced conception of human ‘races’. Von Eschenbach’s Grail is guarded by angels who remained neutral in the War of Heaven, declining to be conscripted into God’s order of battle; but in many northern European folk traditions, they are cast down to become fae or fairies, supernatural creatures beyond ordinary good and evil allegiances. Leaving those categories behind too, Grimmelhausen’s 1669 novel is an often blood-drenched picaresque tale set in the Thirty Years War, in which the author fought. Simplicissimus is considered by some the first great German novel: for example Thomas Mann (who also had deep occult interests) described it as ‘Gaudy, wild, raw, amusing, rollicking and ragged, boiling with life, on intimate terms with good and evil – but in the end, contrite and fully tired of a world wasting itself in blood, pillage and lust’. These horrors informed the folk sensibilities behind the composition of those stories the Grimms collected, but Europe in their time was convulsed by its own terrible struggles. The Napoleonic Wars formed the background to much of the Grimms’ lives and work (Jacob served on the Hessian War Commission, but lost his post when the French occupied Kassel); in Spain they gave rise to Goya’s terrifying Los desastres de la guerra prints. The Grimms’ tales are also ‘on intimate terms with good and evil’ as we are in our times of wars pouring through our computer, television and phone screens. They show circumstances under which a much larger number of us than we would like to believe could commit atrocities, including children enlisted as soldiers, as so movingly described by Uzodinma Iweala in his novel Beasts of No Nation.
The Princess Trapped in the Mountain, etching with aquatint, 2024
Auden’s comment about the Grimms’ collection being one of the foundational texts of Western culture was made during WWII, when Nazis made propaganda films from their books. Victorious Allied commanders banned their publication, as previously alluded to, but apart from the questionable success of any censorship, the attribution of a special susceptibility to evil to particular peoples betrays a dehumanising spirit in itself. Golding’s The Lord of the Flies implied that savagery is even in the hearts of supposedly-innocent, public-school educated children. We are heavily-invested in the myth of childhood innocence, as the debate about the treatment of Jamie Bolger’s killers demonstrated, recently the murder of Brianna Ghey and I remember that surrounding Mary Bell’s in my childhood.
I called my poems for Wood’s exhibition ‘mortuary rhymes’ as opposed to nursery rhymes, coinciding opposites that attempt to restore former elements we now find difficult, elements not of some innocent world of childhood but with Young’s folkloric reality: fear and cruelty mixed with beauty and wonder. They show our whole world to have many dark wells of the type that disturbed the Allied commanders, wells from which monsters might crawl as in Hideo Nakata’s The Ring, for the Grimms’ wells were sunk deep in all our minds and sown with the poison in all our hearts. The following line from Pablo Neruda’s The Sea and the Bells seemed to me to capture this artist’s position in relation to them: ‘We must sit on the rim of the well of darkness and fish for fallen light’. It is in this fishing for fallen light in dark wells and the Water of Life that Wood’s art succeeds so powerfully.
