Daisy Craddock to Speak at Georgia Museum of Art

One of the Daisy Craddock paintings on display at the Georgia Museum of Art

A native of Memphis, Daisy Craddock received her training in Tennessee and here at the University of Georgia, where she received a master of fine arts degree in painting. She then moved to New York City and became involved in conservation, later establishing her own practice specializing in postwar and modern art.

Her work has taken two distinct, though not unrelated, directions. One is an ongoing series of square pieces of paper drenched with color. Craddock utilizes pastel and oil stick to craft finely tuned color studies — a sort of mash-up between Josef Albers and Mark Rothko. She has recently conceived these works as a series of diptychs, with one panel representing the outside of fruits of vegetables and the other their insides, simultaneously abstract and realist. They present the world literally but so reframed through manipulating scale that the viewer is delocalized—just what are we looking at? 

A similar sense of the familiar and the unknown pervades Craddock’s landscapes, two of which are on view in the Georgia Museum of Art’s M. Smith Griffith Grand Hall and one of which (a recent gift) is upstairs, in the museum’s permanent collection galleries. Humans are absent, but the works are not lonely. Salmon-colored passages suggest winding paths, leading us into meditation with nature. The paintings are nostalgic, invoking all the sensory memories of summer days, but they are not sentimental. The landscape is also not an arcadia, but rather an intimate portrait of the artist’s favorite subject: trees.

Her seemingly impulsive brushwork provides a sense of vitality. Many of her early landscapes were painted with bits of sponge at a time when so-called “neo-expressionism” was in vogue in the marketplace and critical circles. The tools create a brushy, breezy quickness, which belies the artist’s slow and deliberate approach to creating. The oft-hectic brushwork further disguises her inherently minimalist compositions. This is the tree reduced to its most essential form.

Comparisons of her work to impressionism are easy and often made. The artist cites color-field theory and Bay Area abstraction as more prominent influences in her masses of color and pared-down forms. The foreground, midground and background merge and separate variously, creating movement and depth within the composition while invoking the proverbial debate between the forest and the trees.

Craddock’s works are on view through October 15, 2018, and the artist will speak at the museum at 3 p.m. on Friday, August 31. Her lecture is titled, “Paintings from the Early Eighties, in Context” and will touch upon her early influences as a young MFA candidate as well as her experiences living and working in New York City. You can learn more about Craddock and her work on her website.

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Joseph Litts

Former Assistant to the Director