CRAIG WADDELL

Grounded

17 - 28 August 2005

Mary Place Gallery

12 Mary Place Paddington

PRESS RELEASE

"Waddell's oil paintings are strong, vibrant works showing an understanding of the personalities of inanimate objects."

Lenny Ann Low - The Sydney Morning Herald, 2004

Sydney artist Craig Waddell shows 22 new paintings in Grounded, a solo show at Mary Place that opens August 17th 2005. After spending several years living and studying in Asia, in 2003 Waddell returned to Australia and his studio on his family's farm outside of Galston, NSW.

"The landscapes in this show are based on the farm where I grew up but are not totally realistic or literal renderings," says Waddell. "They are more like faded memories, triggered by the childhood objects that I find while fossicking around the farm." (As on most rural properties, very little is ever thrown out - the past is almost literally never too far away.)

Tractors dominated Waddell's sold out show last year and the paintings Popsickle and Renegades Are Funk continue to explore this iconic farm machinery. Also in the show are several seascapes, Waddell's adult renderings of childhood memories and stories about Sydney Harbour and the sea.

By painting landscapes and tractors that are based on both life and memory, Waddell connects himself as an artist to the land that his family has worked for four generations and draws parallels between the creative act of landscape painting and the transformation of land by agriculture, both parties working with and struggling against the land based on past experience, present needs and future desire.

Waddell also consciously attempts to both immerse himself in and manipulate his environment in his work: he sketches from life and then paints in a studio environment that is crowded with the objects he finds during his outings, using these traces of memory as the basis for his paintings.

Similarly, while his seascapes are directly inspired by his new home in Sydney, by painting them in his rural studio he colours the works with past emotions, experiences and expectations, creating imaginary places and complex but calm meditations.

Land and landscape has long dominated the history of Australian painting and Waddell is part of a new generation of artists that is reinventing and reinvigorating the subject. Concerns about the environment and a psychological need for serenity in a world that seems dominated by chaos, in part, fuel this renewed interest.

Margie Borschke 2005

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