Richard Davey reflects on four years of transformation in the mysterious landscapes of Christopher P Wood’s latest Goldmark exhibition.
Christopher P Wood picked up his sketchbook, opened it to a blank page, took a cotton bud and dipped it into some homemade oak gall ink. As he always does before beginning a sketch, he quickly drew a rectangle to establish the compositional context for the drawing, defining the space in which the emotional relationships between the figures and the viewer would play out. If the figures or landscape filled it, the narrative would become claustrophobic and focused, if they were tiny and distant, the viewer would be more detached and the atmosphere more reflective. He then dipped the cotton bud back into the ink and let his hand move automatically, intuitively guiding an image into being from the deep repository of his unconscious imagination. Soon, the simple yet enigmatic form of a man standing on a hill in a cloud appeared. The cloud did not hide the man, but encircled him, as if a companion on his journey.
Low Waters, from the Storms series, oil on paper, 2022
Clouds have played a significant symbolic role in the history of Western art. They have been metaphysical heralds, containing the hand of God. Putti and Cherubs have played among them, using them as flying chariots to travel between heaven and earth, and in the domed vaults of baroque churches, they formed a transitional zone, separating the luminous realm of the saints from the corruption of physical matter.
Since the early fifteenth century, artists have been able to realistically represent the three-dimensional solidity of the world using the laws of perspective, containing an object’s outlines within a web of implicit orthogonal lines converging to a vanishing point. Yet clouds present a problem for painters, they are not solid, their edges are indistinct and their substance is insubstantial. Clouds occur when water vapour cools in the atmosphere and forms condensation on the surface of microscopic particles present in the air. When sunlight passes through these invisible droplets of water and ice they may appear as solid wisps, veils, and billowing sails of white and grey, but these castles in the sky are no more solid than a rainbow.
Holy Island, oil on canvas, 2026
John Constable was fascinated by clouds, both as dramatic characters bringing spiritual and emotional intensity to his paintings and as meteorological phenomena that could be studied scientifically as meta-physical realities. During the summers of 1821 and 1822 he set up his easel on Hampstead Heath, and rather than looking at the landscape in front of him as he had done on other occasions, he gazed intently up at the sky, studying the different shapes and types of cloud he could see and making around 100 detailed cloud studies of what he saw. On the back of them he not only noted whereand when they had been painted but also the weather conditions, as if by rooting them in the spot where he stood, he could preserve them like specimens in a natural history collection: Cumulus, Nimbus, Cirrus, Stratus and Altus all pinned down on canvas and board. But while these detailed cloud studies represent the physicality of a specific time and place, they also reflect what happens when you spend prolonged periods of time looking at clouds moving across the sky: time stops; the world becomes a space of fugitive, fleeting realities; what is solid melts into air and light becomes a tangible substance.
Land of the Giant, from the Stages of a Long Journey series, oil on canvas, 2025
Wood’s sketchbooks are filled with esoteric ideas and visual archetypes, with enigmatic personal images like The Man in the Cloud or the Meteor Collector sitting alongside more familiar symbols drawn from the collective unconscious, such as the Siren, the Acolyte, the Angel and the figure of Pan. Turning their pages is like entering the world of the “liber emblematum’ or emblem books that were popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But where these original emblem books set their allegorical engravings alongside mottos and short texts, Wood’s images are not supported by written explanations, they are purely visual, leaving their meaning open to continual interpretation, re-interpretation, and personal speculation.
As Wood tried to understand the figure of the man in the cloud, he came to realise that in this small, quick sketch, he had created a symbolic self-portrait: he was the man in the cloud. He recognised himself as the visionary, prophetic artist, his head above the cloud looking into the metaphysical, mysterious void; the painter seeing castles in the clouds, finding strange creatures in the woods and angels in the sky while painting imaginary landscapes whose guardians are prehistoric monuments recalling a spiritual, symbolic past in a timeless present. But the man in the cloud is also looking into the cloud, confronted by the presence of mystery in this world, the space of the unknown or the state of ‘unknowing,’ as an anonymous fourteenth century English mystic described it, where true knowledge doesn’t come from the abstraction of logical, conscious thought, but from embodied experience and love. His feet are therefore not floating untethered from the physical world but planted firmly on the ground. Wood may be a visionary artist, exposing and uncovering the metaphysical realities of the world, painting landscapes filled with strange, arcane symbols, whose sources are often fairy tales and myths, but his ink is made from oak gall, and his brush marks do not attempt to conceal the physical movements that made them.
Magic Vale, from the Shoreham Mysteries series, oil on paper, 2024
Looking more closely at Wood’s sketch, we realise that the man is not embraced by the cloud but holding it under his arm, like an artist holding a canvas or a board with a sheet of watercolour paper taped to it. At first glance, the rugged mountains and ancient moorlands of Wood’s evocative landscapes may appear solid, but the more time we spend with them the more we realise these mountains are like castles in the sky, a will o the wisp, a comet or shooting star whose physical substance quickly melts into nothing more tangible than a painterly texture. Like a cloud, his paintings are fluid spaces of mystery and revelation. And just as the transit of clouds scudding across the sky captures an invisible photon of light passing through an infinitesimally small water droplet covering the surface of a minute dust particle, these shifting, subtle veils of pigment and expressive gesture also represent a meta-physical truth, that our apparently solid world is not static and fixed but exists in a state of constant flux and flow, becoming and dissolution.
Light allows us to see these invisible processes, but colour allows us to see light. Whether in salmon pink clouds that perfectly capture the sun’s last rays before they disappear, to the ethereal, limpid blue of a day that has only just emerged, Wood uses colour to reveal the metaphysical presence of light. And like Constable, he also employs colour for dramatic effect. It can lead us through a landscape, spotlight a tiny detail, or provoke an emotional reaction. And as his colours interact, butting up against each other, merging into each other, violently repelling each other, they cause the surface of his paintings to subtly vibrate with visual energy, so that his static worlds shimmer with luminous intensity. But we rarely notice this, because just as happens when we look at the world, colour becomes subservient to the figures it reveals, and the solid world becomes the dominant reality.
Quarry Men, from the Stages of a Long Journey series, oil on paper, 2025
Wood has been painting landscapes for forty years. But despite their evocative realism, they are fictions, an accumulation of memories and dreams, fusing Cumbrian Fells with the Yorkshire Dales and Moors and other wildernesses into a sublime fantasy of resonant familiarity. We feel they should be of somewhere, but they are in reality, no-where. But recently, there has been a change. Previously each painting felt that it was an individual narrative, which may have shared a familiar repertoire of landscape motifs and symbolic figures that identified it as belonging to Wood’s distinctive vision, but was largely self-contained within the boundaries of each individual canvas. Now we find ourselves explorers in a wider, more physical landscape that seems to extend beyond the individual painting into the accumulated terrains of a larger imagined world. We have become travellers through this world, pilgrims traversing vast landscapes so that the distant fells or glinting waters of a lake glimpsed in the background of one painting become a vertiginous escarpment and wide frigid waters in the foreground of another.
These imagined worlds were once the territory of strange creatures and hybrid figures or an arcane floating shapes, the relics of a fabled past, teasing mythologies and symbolic languages that have long been forgotten. But gradually, Wood’s distinctive personal symbology has been replaced by emblems that are more universal: ladders offering passage between the physical here and a meta-physical there, inviting us to ascend to explore intangible mysteries; Henges standing as motionless guardians of eternity, waiting to be pierced by the light of a midsummer dawn that dissolves the linear passage of time into an endless circular moment.
The Watchers, from the Stages of a Long Journey series, oil on canvas, 2025
Wood’s worlds are still occasionally inhabited by marginal figures that are refugees from the medieval, pre-enlightenment imagination, but now they are joined by more mundane figures standing by fires, catching meteorites, or walking through a vast, empty landscape perhaps accompanied by a running dog. Instead of strange, symbolic shapes, comets streak through the heavens, while stars emerge blinking at dusk, confronting us directly with the eternal forces of the universe and nature, rather than leaving us perplexed by personal mythologies. The landscape has become as much the subject of these paintings as the figures that inhabit them.
As we gaze into the open spaces of these more intimate and reflective worlds, Wood invites us to pause and reflect on their small, incidental details and to bathe in the gentle colours of their metaphysical light rather than read their story. And if we do so and allow ourselves to fall into these ephemeral clouds of shimmering pigment, we might find ourselves awed into a moment of sublime wonder as we contemplate the eternity contained in an instant of simple, momentary beauty.
