FLORAL PLEASURE
Flowers, relics and Frida Kahlo are just a few of the inspirations behind Sydney artist Craig Waddell’s latest exhibition.
Flowers, relics and Frida Kahlo are a few of the inspirations behind Sydney artist Craig Waddell’s latest exhibition
For artist Craig Waddell, painting takes him into a transcendent space. It is, in its own way, a form of meditation away from the world outside the studio walls, where inspiration — flowers, people, strange objects — was spawned. “There’s this ‘organicness’ that you are somewhat in control of because you’re doing it,” says Waddell. “But I’m looking for that unconsciousness, where I’ve stepped into a studio to paint a painting and walked out and forgotten I was even there.” It was a recent seven-week trip to Mexico — “where things are real and not real,” he says — that inspired his latest exhibition, Mexican Dreams, at Brisbane’s Edwina Corlette Gallery. “There were a lot of things I was attracted to, like relics in museums and sculptures,” he says. “In Mexico City, I spent a lot of time in Frida Kahlo’s house looking at all the antiquities that she and Diego [Rivera, her husband] collected, and how they informed their lives with objects. When I came home, I realised that that’s what I’d done myself: every trip was informed by these little moments, drawings and objects, and they all become part of your life and the fabric of who you are.” Even aside from studying for his master’s degree at Chiang Mai University in Thailand, Waddell has spent much of his life traversing the globe, and travel inspires his work. In Mexico, he immersed himself in the culture, visiting churches, galleries, festivals and shamans, drawing onsite and at his studio in Sydney. These drawings form part of his show alongside a selection of heady, vividly toned paintings. Pen on paper holds much conceptual weight. “It’s culling down the possibilities to just deal with the direct approach of making marks,” he says. “It’s essentially yourself, a piece of paper and a bit of material, and that’s kind of where we start in life. When you’re a kid and haven’t learned to speak, one of the fifirst languages is making marks.” The rapid, adrenaline-inducing act of painting (Waddell works at speed) is at the heart of what he does. His love of the medium is evident in every impassioned stroke, splash and depression of oil. He applies paint in a thick and textural way, working wet on wet for days, and then returning sometimes weeks later to complete the piece. He puts his aesthetic down to a childhood spent on his parents’ farm at rural Galston, north-west of Sydney. “I grew up as a working kid, always digging holes, planting trees, cutting something,” he says. “It was about the earth and textures. We had three dams on our property so I was fascinated with water — that’s where the movement comes from in my paintings, because it’s textured, it’s not solid and flat.” He habitually returned to Galston in between trips, working from a studio space on his parents’ property and from a nearby rose farm — which was where, when he learned of the passing of his closest friend, he began to depict what he is perhaps best known for today: flowers. “It was cathartic,” he says. “The beauty of watching something live and grow and die, and transform and rebirth the next season.” Today, Waddell works from a warehouse he shares with textile designer Cath Derksema on the laneway behind his Annandale home. He converted it but retained its historic details. “I haven’t even lined the walls,” he says. “They’re like shearer-shed walls; I love propping up my paintings against them.” Ultimately, it’s a place that reminds him of home in the country. “It doesn’t feel like you’re in the city,” he says. “It’s just a beautiful, big old shed. It’s quite romantic, really.”
“I grew up as a working kid, always digging holes, planting trees, cutting something. It was about the earth and textures”
Mexican Dreams runs until 17 September; edwinacorlette.com. Visit craigwaddell.com.