New Zealand artist Grahame Sydney art posters prints lithographs and book

Excerpts from "Interview", Reg Graham

R: So when it comes to getting up of a boring morning, and facing a blank canvas, where are you?

G: This is going to sound rather pretentious perhaps, but the sustaining energy comes from a real sense, which has developed over time, that there are a lot of things that I want to get painted and delivered to the world before I go. There is a serious sense of mission in me now. I won't say that I feel I've been put here to do these things, because that's sort of 'destination' - destiny philosophy is not what I believe. I worry far more about wasting time. I've got images stacked up like a sort of CD rack in my head, and I'm not getting the time to do them. I'm ageing much faster than I'd like to - that's where my dogged persistence is really fuelled.

R: And do you, at the age of 51 anticipate that your best is yet to come?

G: Oh yes, I sure do. Because I'm refining more and more not only what I think makes a powerful and memorable image - and both of those words I use carefully because they are what I hope to do - but I'm also far more acutely sensitive to what it is that has to be built into these paintings, about me and my experiences. That's what I think is the true subject of probably every painter.

R: I think it's (Rozzie at Pisa) still an extraordinary piece of composition, in that it has a strong diagonal line running counter to the figure, and the square-format image is surrounded by quite insubstantial detail. The light sockets and light shades, chromium door handle, and the white curtain on the right-hand side, is quite at odds with the general landscape and situation in which the whole thing is set. Compositionally very strange but extremely powerful. I'm not at all sure why.

G: No, well I'm not either. Diagonals are something I have always loved, and the stronger the diagonal in a painting the more I relish it. In this case it's an X-shaped composition isn't it, with the angle of Ros's neck. And then it's a square within a square because the window of the door is another square, which is sort of optical illusion. These things sometime come about, without any deliberateness by me, although you know I do a series of pencil studies, and I've got all the studies for this painting.

Just how it came to be I couldn't tell you; it's not that calculated or intelligent, I'll refer back to the instinct at work here. But it is deliberate to select which details you want to accompany the major thrust of the composition, with for example, how much of the torso you would show - what point to cut it off and so on. When you work as I do, everything given is given for a purpose - there is nothing included by outright accident. If it's in there, it's in there for a reason. There are eliminations from the truth which you won't be aware of, and there are additions to the truth which you won't be aware of.

I can remember clearly, although this is well over twenty years ago, knowing how important it was to have the mysterious shape of the stainless steel door handle coming in, because it had a small element of 'claw' to it - a bit of viciousness or unease there, in what was otherwise a very settled composition - apart from that racking diagonal which upset the calm of it. And the same with the light socket without a light in it. It would be reasonable to expect that, being us, it probably was a light socket without a light in it. We would get round to it at some point! But these things have a pictorial function, and a pictorial purpose. As does the lacy curtain. In purely formal terms, the introduction of that softness brings in another quality towards the 'femaleness' of it, in a rigid setting. It also avoids the predictable boredom of a square which I didn't think in this case was appropriate. It winds up with a three-sided square...

What we should be talking about, though, are the more important things that I would love people to wonder about. Things like: if this is a portrait of somebody, why is it arranged this way? Why, for example, is she not looking back at us? Why do we appear to be lower in our viewpoint than she is? Why do we look up to her? Who is doing the looking? Why would the painter, in this case, elevate the head above our point of view? You know, our sort of horizontal point of view. Is this a picture of some contentment, or is this a picture of anxiety? What is happening here?"

Well, that's the way I think pictures should function. The mystery is important. If you can get them to wonder about why it's like this, then the art is more fascinating. You asked the question why has this become so well known? It's because - apart from its classical simplicity and feeling, and Ros has, fortunately for her, a very lovely face - there is plenty for people to wonder about. And maybe that's why it has lingered in the public imagination to some degree."

The Art of Grahame Sydney, Longacre Press

Excerpts from "Humanity and Nature", Brian Turner

"No discussion of Sydney's work is complete without reference to his veneration for people, places and objects. We venerate those and that which embody dignity and pride. The land is a living entity, and the mountains are shrines which are venerated. The things we build and the objects we leave behind are what gives us dignity and pride, a sense of some significance, that our lives have meaning.

Of course today many of us seek to escape or avoid reality, or seek different realities in video parlours without ever having experienced the outdoor world at all. So in a sense the world that Sydney presents to us is becoming less well-known to our increasingly urban-oriented populace. His is not a world waiting to be used by 'adventure-tourists' and 'thrill-seekers', it is for those who prefer reflection and contemplation.

For Sydney, of course, accepts that to some the sea and the mountains spell animus; they exert power over us, they teach us the need for prudence, for self-reliance; they reveal beauties verging on the sublime. Sydney, however, downplays the animus, encourages the need for respect and, at times, a degree of deference."

"In essence so many of his paintings are about staying not leaving, about enduring, hanging on. How do you persist and exist here, glory in what you see, respect what has gone before, what remains, and what will live on? What does live on? Nothing organic remains the same; little of what we, humans, make is assured of continuance. But a painting might last, a poem, a story. The land tells a story, the dilapidated buildings testify to other stories bound up in the land's story, and the clouds are transient but keep on coming, forming and reforming.

Sydney's world, his wilderness where the spirit is tested and strengthened by a pure airiness, great space, is almost always unforested. Or is it? If you can locate yourself here it is in a forest of loneliness, temperamentally, where you are exposed to yourself and everything else. You need strength of purpose, of character; you need courage to stand up here and not avert the eyes. Only through distance can you find yourself. Beyond the far blue, gold, or dun hills and mountains, beneath cirrus edged with gold, there's a self to be reckoned with.

Do we explore the land, or does it explore us?"

The Art of Grahame Sydney, Longacre Press