On Landscape, Creative Transformation, & Finding Community at Eastworks
For artist Christopher Willingham, the last eight years at Eastworks have been a period of quiet but profound reinvention: a shift in medium, in focus, and in what it means to make work at all.
Willingham is a painter by training, with undergraduate degrees in both painting and art history, as well as an MFA in sculpture from Bard College. He describes his process as having “a kind of mediumistic promiscuity.” Over two decades teaching at Holyoke Community College, he worked across oil, collage, mixed media, drawing, printmaking and sculptural installation. But since landing at Eastworks, something has changed. He’s been pulled outdoors toward landscape, photography, and a slower way of working.
His studio reflects all of it: recent photographs printed on etching paper, pencil studies of Leonardo da Vinci drawings, images of Peaked Mountain and Goat Rock and Barton’s Cove. It’s a space in mid-conversation with itself, and Willingham wouldn’t have it any other way.
From Teaching to Making
For twenty years, Willingham was at Holyoke Community College, teaching studio art and bringing old master drawings into the classroom not as lectures but as invitations. When he left teaching in 2020 — a decision shaped by COVID, institutional changes at HCC, and by the needs of his son Julian, who has an autoimmune condition — he stepped back from the local art scene he’d been active in for years. His last solo exhibition, at the Anchor House of Artists in Northampton, opened on the Friday the world shut down. Seven people attended.
“Life was spinning me in a different direction,” he says.
Turning Toward Landscape
What emerged from that stillness was a deeper relationship with the outdoors. During the lockdown, Willingham began spending more time outside — not as recreation, but as something closer to necessity. “I found myself spending more time outside in a very different way,” he says. “I felt pulled toward a kind of communion. A need to feel grounded.”
A former HCC colleague, photographer Bob Aller, became a regular companion on excursions. Together they’d go on shoots, and photography, which Willingham had never seriously considered as part of his practice, began to take root. His approach has been entirely intuitive. “I’m kind of a blissful idiot with photography. I have no technical experience. I don’t know what an F-stop is. I don’t know anything about apertures, and I don’t want to know.”
Alongside this, he returned to studying old master landscape paintings and drawings to find his way into conversation with them. “The physics are unique to the hand and seeing is unique to the eye. So maybe I can see someone else seeing and I can approach touching what they touched, but inevitably I’m what’s gonna spill out on the page,” he says.
The result is work that emerges from a layering of photography and drawing, between documentation and mark-making. He prints photographs on Rives BFK drawing paper to evoke the weather and environment present in his charcoal drawings and etchings.”I don’t always know exactly how it will go, but that’s the joy of finding out.”
A Creative Home at Eastworks
Willingham arrived at Eastworks under pressure. A sudden studio displacement in Chicopee, Mass. left him scrambling in the middle of a summer heat wave. But the building quickly became something more than a landing spot.
“This is without question the nicest studio I’ve ever had,” he says. He’s adapted his practice to the space: the scale is smaller, the mess more contained. Oil painting is on pause, but any constraints have focused him rather than limited him.
What he didn’t expect was how much the community would matter.
“There’s a kind of collective buzz,” he says. “The booming, buzzing creativity of being in this kind of environment.” He mentions Barbara Johnson next door — they worked together at the World Eye Bookshop in Greenfield back in 1992. He speaks warmly of Erin McNally at Tiny Anvil, connected through a mutual HCC colleague, and of the late Arnold Skolnick upstairs, whom he got to know through Bob Aller. The building, for Willingham, is woven through with these threads.
He’s candid that he doesn’t get out of his studio as often as he’d like. But proximity, he’s learned, is its own kind of sustenance. “I’ve learned not to underestimate the value of just being proximal to others. I know she’s on the other side of the wall over there painting. And it’s stabilizing.”
What’s Coming
Willingham is building toward a new chapter under the name Caduceus Studios. The centerpiece is a book: a collection of landscape photographs woven together with responses to beloved paintings and the experience of being in nature. He’s also developing ideas for children’s books: contemporary retellings of classical mythology and folklore, inspired in part by the illustrated books of Gerald McDermott that he rediscovered reading to his son, Julian.
“One of the greatest things about becoming a father was having real reasons to sit down and read through all of these great books again,” he says.
Once the landscape book is ready, the plan is to bring the work back out and exhibit locally, to open the studio more fully, and re-enter the community he stepped back from a few years ago.
For now, the work continues at Eastworks: layered, patient, and finding its way forward.
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