CRAIG WADDELL
Sydney, Australia | Born 1973
Craig Waddell is a contemporary Australian artist known for his richly textured and expressive paintings of landscape, flowers, figures and familiar objects from everyday life. Born in Sydney in 1973, Waddell graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art from the National Art School in 1999 before completing a Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking at Chiang Mai University in Thailand in 2004. Working across painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture, he has developed a distinctive practice characterised by energetic mark-making, strong colour and heavily worked surfaces.
Central to Waddell's painting is the physical process of applying and manipulating paint. His works often develop through layers of colour and gesture, with images emerging, disappearing and being reworked as the painting progresses. This intuitive approach gives his work a tactile quality and a sense of movement, allowing even familiar subjects to take on an expressive and sometimes almost abstract character. His subjects have ranged widely from landscapes, seascapes and flowers to portraits, birds, roosters and tractors.
Waddell has received significant recognition throughout his career. In 2010 he won the Mosman Art Prize with I Remember You As You Were My Beauty, a sensuously painted image of a single protea. He had received a commendation in the same prize the previous year. His other awards include the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize, Tattersall's Art Prize for landscape painting, Paddington Art Prize and Norville Australian Landscape Prize.
He has also been selected as a finalist in many major Australian art prizes, including the Archibald Prize, Wynne Prize, Sulman Prize, Dobell Drawing Prize, Blake Prize, Glover Prize and Kilgour Prize. Waddell has received important travelling scholarships and residencies, including the Marten Bequest Travelling Art Scholarship, the Moya Dyring residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris through the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and a studio residency at Artspace's Gunnery in Sydney. His career has also included residencies in Thailand and Vietnam.
Landscape has remained an important part of Waddell's practice, but rather than simply recording a particular view, his paintings explore atmosphere, memory and the physical experience of a place. Broad gestures, layered surfaces and passages of intense colour can move between representation and abstraction, allowing the landscape to remain recognisable while giving the painting a strong emotional and physical presence.
The works by Craig Waddell offered through Plum Gallery demonstrate this range particularly well. Cloudy Day, Crimson Passage, As the Crow Flies and What Lies Beneath reveal his expressive approach to the Australian landscape, where colour, texture and gesture are as important as the landscape itself. Tractor Trev, meanwhile, brings one of Waddell's recurring subjects into the collection — transforming an ordinary piece of machinery through vigorous colour and painterly handling. Together, the works provide collectors with an excellent introduction to the breadth and distinctive visual language of this accomplished contemporary Australian artist.
