Daisy Craddock

Front Room Gallery and Garvey|Simon are pleased to present Daisy Craddock: Harvest, opening October 29, 2020 at the Front Room Gallery, 48 Hester Street, on the Lower East Side, New York. Drawn from life, Craddock considers her diptychs to be literal depictions of her fruit and vegetable subjects: skin on the left side, and flesh on the right. When seen from a distance, Craddock’s produce-portraits appear to be abstract blocks of color. Recently, she has begun to introduce a subtle play of form and light into her pastels. Daisy Craddock: Harvest will include her diptychs in an array of sizes, as well as her smaller, finished studies. 

Craddock explores new scales and sizes in her recent pastels. In addition to her standard square-foot format, she has added smaller, study-sized pairings, and more commanding, large-scale sets to her oeuvre. The demure, half-sized scale offers an intimate view of her subjects, suggesting a close and contemplative practice. Craddock saturates these smaller studies with dramatic color shifts and deliberately executed gradients, visualizing the flavor packed into her produce. The expansiveness of Craddock’s new, larger scale becomes a playground for form and volume. Opaque striations map out furrows and crests, transforming the plane into sensuous cartography. Ever interested in the tactility of her “sitter,” Craddock captures not just the two-dimensional landscape of its surface, but the curvatures of its body, as well. Craddock’s saturated colors are redolent of the smells and tastes of summer, however their smooth surfaces belie much layering and scraping away below. These works are intended to be experienced at the edge of description and abstraction. 

Locally-sourced from markets around her studio in Germantown, New York, and grown from hand in her backyard garden, the works in Harvest comprise a visual history of this year’s crop. Craddock reflects:

“In the midst of this pandemic, I am a very fortunate transplanted New Yorker. Suddenly living full time in the beautiful Hudson Valley, I am surrounded by small farms and an endless supply of local produce. With time on my hands, I planted my first garden this spring, and it soon became a metaphor for these times. Despite cucumber wilt and horned green caterpillars, the lettuce from my garden has fed us for months and I am still drawing tomatoes.”

Craddock has a personal relationship with her subjects, fostered over months of tending to seedlings, and hours of toil in her studio. Her near-obsessive fascination with heirloom tomatoes is channeled into something of a visual biography, tracing their maturation from pale, unblemished green, through orange signal flares of ripening, to brick-red and bursting with flavor. The process of her mark-making is reminiscent of the labor of harvest - muscular and deceptively physical. Initial, indelible marks on the paper are equivalent to turned soil, laying the foundation for colors, aromas, and textures to bloom. The fragile surfaces of Daisy’s pastels are as capricious as the plants themselves - the success of both is incredibly fragile. They are microcosms of creation: from the germination of the seed, to the final pastel freckle. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Daisy Craddock (b.1949, Memphis, TN) received a BA in Fine Arts from Rhodes College and an MFA in Painting from the University of Georgia. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States. Recent one person shows include Summer Produce, Garvey Simon Gallery, June 2017. and Daisy Craddock: A View of One’s Own, August 2017; John Davis Gallery, Hudson NY. An installation of Daisy’s work from the 1980’s was on view in the lobby of the Georgia Museum of Art from July 23 – October, 2018. Recent group shows include Art on Paper 2019, Weatherspoon Art Museum, NC, In Conversation, Clough Hanson Gallery, Rhodes College, Memphis TN, RAIR @ 50, Roswell Museum and Art Center, Flower Power, Garvey Simon Gallery, New York City.

Daisy’s work has been reviewed in Art in America, The New York Times, Art & Antiques, American Artist, Art News, and Arts Magazine among numerous other publications. An interview with Brainard Carey for Yale Radio can be found in the PRAXIS radio archives. Public collections include the Anderson Museum, Newark Museum, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Georgia Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Roswell Museum, Rubin Museum of Art, and the Weatherspoon Art Museum. Daisy is the recipient of a 1989 Roswell Artist in Residency and a 2002 New York Foundation for the Arts, New York Arts Recovery Grant. The artist lives and works in Germantown, New York.

for sales inquires contact Garvey|Simon