Christopher Wood
(British, 1901–1930)
Biography
Christopher Wood was a British painter known for his idiosyncratic paintings depicting the region around St. Ives. Influenced by the naïve art of the Cornish fisherman Alfred Wallis, Wood utilized skewed perspectives and distorted scale to frame his richly muted colors and elegant lines. “Do you know that all the great modern painters are not trying to see things and paint them through the eyes of a man of forty or fifty or whatever they may be, but through the eyes of the smallest child who sees nothing except the things that would strike him as being the most important?” Wood once asked. “To the childish drawing they add the beauty and refinement of their own experience—this is the explanation of modern painting.” Born on April 7, 1901 in Liverpool, United Kingdom, he went on to study at the Académie Julian in Paris. While in Paris, he met Tony Gadarillas, a Chilean diplomat with hedonistic tendencies. It was Gadarillas who introduced Wood to opium, the drug’s hallucinogenic properties later sparked surrealistic imagery in the artist’s work. Although some of Wood’s greatest works came out of his addiction, withdrawal symptoms caused him deep paranoia. Suffering from acute opiate withdrawal, Wood committed suicide at the age 29 on August 21, 1930 in Salisbury, United Kingdom. Today, his works are in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.
Christopher Wood Artworks
Christopher Wood
(724 results)
English (US)
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