Writings

Gazing across the choppy vistas of Craig Waddell’s most recent show, I can’t help but feel a sense of déjà vu. Headlands, with its craggy outcrops and deep dark blues, is full of places I’ve seen before but can’t quite think where. Places I know I’ve returned to time and again, yet struggle to find a location for in the old memory map. It isn’t until a friend sidles up beside me and whispers in my ear “far out, this reminds me of a Tim Winton book” that I realise it’s somewhere I’ve only ever visited in the pages of…

Paint applied in thick slathers, scraped back and then reapplied is the constant by which Craig Waddell depicts his subjects. The first point of discussion to Craig Waddell’s paintings is his dynamic manipulation of material. I spent many afternoons with Craig at Gallery 9, Sydney, discussing his work and his process. He would bring in new paintings, often still wet, and we would lean them against the walls to view them. For Craig, seeing his paintings against the clean white walls of the gallery, away from the gritty nucleus of the studio, they embodied a new dimension – they were…

How did growing up on a farm shape your subject matter and the way you paint? Our family’s fruit farm is in Galston, about an hour north west of Sydney. The landscape motivated me to make imagery: not just site-specific landscapes, but also objects such as tractors, roosters and flowers that were representative of the landscape. The farm has had a huge affect on how I paint because of the rigorous physicality of life there. We all grew up helping out on the farm – getting up before sunrise, picking fruit, performing the daily tasks – and I think that…

During 2003-2004 Waddell traveled to Thailand as an Australian volunteer. He says he couldn’t help but document his immediate environment. The journey gave Waddell invaluable insights into the social hierarchies of village life which were repeatedly dominated (for men) by the ritualised practice of cockfighting. A concept was embedded in the artist’s subconscious during his travels through Thailand but remained unresolved at that time. The effects of poverty and unemployment combined with boredom to create an atmosphere of general dissatisfaction among the male populace of the villages. Waddell notes the enthusiasm with which this void was filled with a mixture…

In my cheap hotel room in Rome the walls were decorated with floor-to-ceiling photo wallpaper of a fantastic autumnal scene. The effect was a disturbing trompe l’oeil that invited the viewer to leap off the creaky double bed’s headboard into a forest, wander along a path scattered with bright orange and yellow leaves, take rest on a conveniently placed wooden bench, and then regard this Silvan Glade with the detached melancholy of a Romantic poet. In reality, however, the solid wall and its brute physics resisted any attempt to physically enter the picture. The encounter was one for the eyes…

Abstraction always seems to be at odds with figuration. An artist may go in one direction, leaving behind painterly language that suggests a picture is a representation of something in the world, and sail ever on towards a realm of form and colour cut adrift from the real, or they may idle in the warm glow of recognisable places and things. In Ocean and Earth Craig Waddell is trying to balance between the two – some pictures here are avowedly engaged with the world of the abstract, while others contain enough clues to find a ship, a sky, a cloud,…