Christopher Le Brun's art is rooted in the long tradition of the English appreciation of landscape and nature - whether expressed in painting, poetry or music - which provide a common ground frequently referred to throughout his work.
About Woodlines
The title for this series of paintings came from printmaking. As Christopher explains: "The question I had set myself was how to make woodcuts out of habitual and ordinary actions such as cutting, pressing and covering - that already feel dense enough with significance to stand up for themselves outside any context of technical sophistication. Cutting a line suggested a direct analogy with making a path through an unknown forest or wood. Some paths lead to a clear destination, some just wander along or return on themselves or even suddenly end. Putting oneself on the wood-path or wood-line is therefore to set out, guided not by everyday logic, but by something else.
Woods and trees have formed a central motif of my work, in particular culminating in the four monumental paintings made between 1987 and 1990: Forest, Aram Nemus Vult, The Briar Wood and Tristan. The Woodlines paintings feel like the concentrated essential inheritors of those works and indeed, for proof of the idea's longevity, I can still remember one my very earliest paintings - three simple white columns spaced a little apart, like a portico against a dark wood."