High Country Six Pack of Parks Campaign, 14 June 2006

Message of Support from artist Grahame Sydney

"I am honoured to be a small part of the High Country Parks initiative, and send my congratulations today, and best wishes for its permanent success.

Of the six parks nominated thus far, two are particularly well known to me - Pisa Range and the Hawkdun/Oteake Range - and have staked out segments of both my heart and work. I lived beneath the glowering bulk of Mount Pisa for eight years until 1983; and I built my present house in order to have the pleated wall of the Hawkdun's as my daily companion to the north: as I write this the sun is turning the Hawkdun's white winter coat peach-pale, and soon that snow will glow like a line of dull scarlet embers before the rising shadow line claims it for the night. That beautiful, slow show is one of the cherished gifts of my daily life.

I believe many of us identify ourselves most tellingly by the landscapes we find running deepest inside. For me, when I am overseas and thinking of New Zealand I am not thinking of the map of New Zealand, but of specific local points on that map - a view, a valley, a road, a private place. I believe each of us carries such a treasured image within us wherever we are, and it helps us know who we are, helps define us to ourselves and others. It's an experience, or visual version of the curl of hair lovers used to wear close to their heart, cased in a silver locket, and never removed.

Many New Zealanders know this lingering power of the landscape, and painters like me try to give it a form, to show what it feels like for me, and why it might matter. Writers do it in careful words dredged from their hearts. Photographers look for the moment which can deliver that memorable image, and make it more significant still. We all do it because it matters, and we care.

So we care about the protection of these landscapes, and believe absolutely that they are an essential part of our New Zealandness.

I wish all strength to the arms of those who are making these Parks a reality, and thank them for the gift they represent: to remain preserved as places of deep and natural pleasure, the eternal symbols of what it's like being us, and where we belong."

Scoop Independent News, 3 April 2006

Frontseat’s Search for Greatest NZ Painting

Frontseat’s Search for Greatest New Zealand Painting turns up Ten Big Ones

The top ten finalists in the Search for the Greatest New Zealand Painting have been unveiled on TV One’s arts show Frontseat (Sunday 2nd April), and members of the public are now invited to vote on which is New Zealand’s greatest painting. The top ten span 102 years of painting in New Zealand and include four Colin McCahons and two by Rita Angus. Nine of the top ten are held in public collections. The oldest dates back to the 19th Century, the most recent is a 1993 Bill Hammond. Over the past six weeks hundreds of New Zealanders – including art experts and enthusiasts such as Jenny Gibbs, Wystan Curnow, Gregory O’Brien, Mark Amery, James Wallace, Christina Barton and Marshall Seifert – have nominated works that they believe stand as a pinnacle of painting craft in our land. These nominations, and the finalists, can be seen on Frontseat’s website (www.frontseat.co.nz) and on the websites of the public collections they are held in.

The only criteria for Frontseat’s Search For The Greatest New Zealand Painting were that it must be a painting by a New Zealander, or a painting created in New Zealand.

“It may sound like a daft idea given that no two paintings are alike, and we know it will create controversy, but we wanted to celebrate the Kiwi canvas and find out what it takes to make a great painting,” says Frontseat host Oliver Driver. Dunedin gallery owner Marshall Seifert and art critic and curator Wystan Curnow submitted a “top 10” and “top 11” respectively at the beginning of the search.

Upon hearing of the finalists, Curnow remarked “It’s a pretty timid outcome. Four McCahons is commendable I suppose, although in the company he’s been given to keep, it should probably be more than that and better McCahons. I have to say I’m really upset that the Frontseat audience endorsed only one of MY ‘top 11’; I don’t know what that’s going to do for my art boffin status.” Seifert congratulated New Zealanders on showing good taste: “I’m sure you’ve surprised a legion of heavy-breathers.” He was pleased with the inclusion of Robin White and Bill Hammond in the top ten, but felt that the lack of a [Tony] Fomison and a [Toss] Woollaston was lamentable. “However, I’m sure that history will remedy that.” Oliver Driver said the poll had “stimulated debates about what constitutes a great painting, and what these works say about our identity, the growth of art practice in our country, and what value we place on art in our own homes”.

Seifert agreed. “You can’t discuss something like this without being aware of the great sadness of going into New Zealand homes that contain no paintings”. He said the simplest start for remedying this was for New Zealanders to frame and admire their own children’s art.

The public now has four weeks to cast their vote to elevate one of the ten finalists to the number one position. Voting closes on April 27th and the results will be revealed on Sunday 30th April on Frontseat, TV One. Voting can be done online at www.frontseat.co.nz, by email (letters@frontseat.co.nz) or by writing to Frontseat, PO Box 6185, Te Aro, Wellington.

Bannockburn, 22 October 2005

Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition, Olssen’s Vineyard, Grahame Sydney

We may not spend much time in the actual physical engagement with an art work, standing there in front of it, or walking around it in a concentrated, contemplative silence, but we know too well it still matters a great deal to us, and plays a necessary part in our lives.

If we obeyed cold logic, or allowed that commonsense to rule the cheque book and the hand which reaches for it, I believe few really fine works of art would be made, and our country’s culture would be a thinner, meaner thing: the courage to be a buyer parallels the courage it takes to accept that understanding and immediate acceptance are NOT pre-requisites for something to be wonderful. The wonder often resides in the inability to explain.

In fact, I tend towards the harsher belief that if we DO feel we understand and know - if we “get it” - immediately when confronting a new work of art, its is very likely not much good at all. If it can be known so rapidly, understood with such ease, arguably it then contains no depth, can only be shallow.

By trusting their own unique instincts, by being “utterly peculiar to themselves”, and by defying all pressure to conform to norms which are not their own, they deliver something which feeds a need deep inside another life. It takes courage to dig deep and find that separate, personal, instinctive manner which is yours alone, trusting that voice which no-one else can hear, which no-one has taught you. Whether a maker or a buyer, courage is the operative word, and without it we are all ordinary. Risk is so often richly rewarded : to not risk is to condemn ourselves to dull, predictable, conventional tedium, and to die unexplored, untested.

I have believed for many years now that a strong work of art is more “valuable” – not monetarily, though that is the “value” of choice to many these days – no, a strong, lasting work of art, whether it be sculpture in glorious 3 dimensions, like so many of these works here today, or the magical play of pigment of a flat 2 dimensional surface, is best judged by its capacity to linger and play in our memories.

Just like people : the most valuable – not monetarily – friends in life are those we are unable to forget, regardless of whether they appear on a daily basis, or only rarely. We may only look closely at them for a few minutes, but they remain signifcant, vital to our lives, feeding us privately.

Theory has nothing to do with it, nor does fashion : there is nothing less attractive to me – and this has been a good week to be reminded of its essential vacuousness – nothing so shallow and transitory as fashion. No artist should ever long for their work to be fashionable.

Lasting, memorable, unforgettable, being of one’s time, being true to one’s own instincts alone, being like nobody else – defying all other expectations, and finding the appropriate skills to give those private instincts proper form - these are the keys to quality.

Just like people – and sculpture, in its human scale and occupation of spaces, as we do, often delivers notion this more powerfully than any other art – an exhibition is a platform for testing our judgment, and our instincts. Its easy for a man to feel his heart hammering at the sight of a gorgeous woman….. I guess Nature is responsible for that. But that gorgeous woman quickly loses all magic, all her initial seductive appeal if that man discovers there is no brain at home, no mystery, no heart, nothing more to admire than the superficial, shallow glamour. That experience will become a bad memory, a guilty memory because of the foolishness it symbolises.

Good and great works must be good memories, companions for life, companions which remain fascinating, challenging ideally, and pleasing for our closeness to them. We may not look at them long and lovingly, but they are locked securely within, and travel with us wherever we go. We may never understand them, like our own children we never really understand. But we love them all our lives, and they sing like the songs of birds inside us.

Courage in the making, courage in the supporting – these risks are best rewarded. Understanding and explanation are not always necessary – to try to do so often sterilises the mystery and kills the lingering, lasting wonder. Hope instead for something you can’t forget, no matter how much else crowds your head. The song of a bird inside us.

And if you can’t forget it, you know you’ve seen something wonderful. You may even be fortunate enough, as its caretaker, to be able to look at it for a minute or two every now and then.

Otago Daily Times, 19 May 2005

Something Old, Something New in Sydney Exhibition, by Joanne Campbell

The Marshall Seifert Gallery is hosting an exhibition by pre-eminent realist Grahame Sydney . The exhibition consists of paintings and prints spanning nearly 30 years.

The earliest work, Still Life; Doll, 1977, is quite different in character from his later work. The etching is executed with his customary attention to detail but the result is eerie and unsettling, largely due to the choice of subject. The doll form closely resembles a baby and its rigidity is therefore disturbing.

Standing Model, 1987 is one of Sydney ’s characteristic female nudes. The figure’s face is hidden by the T-shirt she is pulling up over her head. This anonymity allows Sydney to depict a universal rather than a particular individual. Dee Study, 2004 is in some ways a much more revealing work despite the fact that her modesty is preserved by the use of careful drapery. Sydney subtly conveys the sensuality of his subjects while distancing them from the prying eyes of the viewer.

The three paintings that feature in the exhibition reveal his affinity with the landscape. In Port Mark, 1993, the central triangular sign that dominates the work invites the viewer to peer around at the landscape beyond. The composition is beautifully balanced. Wilson Boys’ Boat, 1984 depicts a boat on a trailer on the beach. The strong vertical and horizontal elements in the trailer provide a contrast with the elegant curvature of the boat’s hull.

The exhibition also offers the opportunity to see a new work. The vast majority of Grahame Sydney ’s paintings move directly from the easel into a collection which means the general public has little opportunity to see his work. Night Store, 2005 was completed just last week.

Anyone who has driven from Dunedin to Christchurch will have seen the subject first-hand. The store at Herbert appears out of the blackness. The architectural form is lit from the left. As a result, the detail we have come to expect from Sydney is evident on that side, while on the right the building seems to fade into the night.

Sydney seems to have an innate sense of symmetry and harmony that infuses all of the works.

Otago Daily Times, 19 May 2005

Sydney landscape limited edition label, by John Galbraith

They say wine-making is an art — and with Gra hame Sydney involved, that claim is beyond doubt.

A painting by the Dunedinbased artist, well-known for his depictions of the Central Otago/ Maniototo landscape, graces the labels of the newly released limited edition Central Otago 2002 Celebration Pinot Noir.

Sydney was at the Carrick Winery in Bannockburn yesterday to check the finished result of his handiwork. He said he had liked the idea of an artist doing the label and had had no reservations about doing the job. “I was very flattered to be invited, in fact.”

Only one barrel of the wine was made and people bid for futures on it at the Central Otago Pinot Noir Celebration auction in 2002. The auction raised about $30,000 for the barrel, which averages about $110 a bottle, and part of the proceeds went to the Otago Polytechnic’s Cromwell campus.

Sydney said he was “a great lover of pinots”. “I think we do it beautifully [in Central Otago].” However, he joked he was too poor to afford such special wine.

The label art was a watercolour version of his well-known Pig Root Pond oil painting from about 10 years ago. Sydney said painting a label was different from his regular work, as it had to both attract attention on the shelf and allow some space for information about the wine. “It was quite a hard thing to find an image that would still be mine but would allow those two functions.” He said it had proved a challenge as he was not a commercial artist used to such concerns. “I found it actually quite worrying, because I had stepped into that other area where I don’t normally live.”

2005 Celebration chairman Duncan Forsyth said the wine had been blended from the best wine of 25 different wineries in the region, and the idea behind the limited edition was to both celebrate the region’s wine and raise money for worthy Central Otago organisations and activities. Previous years’ limited edition labels had been designed by artists Ralph Hotere and Andrew Drummond, and next year’s would be done by Bill Hammond.

Otago Daily Times, 30 April 2005

Colourful Conversation as Artists take Stage, by Celia Williams

Prominent New Zealand artists Grahame Sydney and Jeffrey Harris addressed a crowd of about 300 in Wanaka yesterday.

The painters discussed their work and shared their opinions on New Zealand art at the Pacific Crystal Palace, as part of the Southern lakes Festival of Colour.

Harris, who said he was “driven to work”, saw his art as his job, saying there was nothing “romantic” about it. “Any inspiration or ideas just come through the work process, but you have got to have the motivation to get there.”

Sydney said it was important for artists to not get “seduced by easy flattery”, which made it easy for them to imitate themselves. “It’s life of commerce and death of art, and commerce is of no interest to me.”

Otago Daily Times, 7 March 2005

Laureateship gives Turner Blank Page

A two-year award has given Central Otago poet Brian Turner the impetus to write a new volume of work, Footfall. He talks to longtime friend, painter Grahame Sydney.

GS: What does the Te Mata laureateship demand of a poet?
BT: One of the great things is that you can do what you like. They give you a modest amount of money and say that at the end of two years they’ll publish a collection of work. They don’t require you to go to anything in particular, they don’t require you to write to order; they hope you’ll be a good ambassador for literature in general and for poetry in particular and that, at the end of it, something worthwhile will have eventuated — in the interests of poetry itself in New Zealand, and for you personally. Other than that I was unaware of any expectations.

GS: Did this mantle of the laureateship bring with it any change in your attitude to yourself as a poet? Did it make you feel any more professional, for example?
BT: Only slightly. People took a bit more notice of me, as is always the case when someone else decides a person’s work is worth something. I think in the south here many people saw it as a bit of a tick for the south, and some people may have thought it’s good to have someone with broad interests. A lot of people believe, even though they may not say so, that poets are a bit odd — a bit precious, a bit effete, maybe. If that is the case then I’d like to think that perhaps I’m the sort of person who might dispel that.

GS: Do you have any feelings about the fact that this laureateship comes from a private patron, rather than from somewhere more official — Government, for example?
BT: No. I think it’s a good idea to give awards, laureateships and such to people for a finite period of time. The English system of being conferred from on high, as it were, and for the duration of one’s lifetime, appears to me to be rather wrong — there’s an egalitarian side of me which likes to see things shared about a bit.

GS: It also demands that it be given to somebody at a very good time of their writing power. The English model runs the risk of the laureate hanging on well into senility. Do you think this came at a good time for you?
BT: Yes, because I’ve always been someone who felt quite precarious in all sorts of ways and lacked faith in my own abilities. In terms of the age thing, I think they intend it to be given to people who have produced a substantial body of work of reasonable quality, and it suggested to me that those responsible felt that I must have done that.

GS: Are "those responsible" a mystery bunch?
BT: Yeah, apart from Bill Manhire I don’t know who else is responsible.

GS: The only other form of patronage available to writers is that people buy your book, and too few buy poetry. Have you taken any deliberate crusading into this tenure to try to get people more comfortable, more keen about reading poetry?
BT: I tend to believe there are quite a number of people around the country who aren’t put off by what I write, who find my work quite accessible, and who see it as often concerned with real things, with which they can make some sort of connection.

GS: Given that every poet has a unique voice, and that you like your work to be recognised as uniquely yours, how would you characterise your voice? What would a reader expect a Brian Turner voice to sound like — what would preoccupy it?
BT: I hope they would accept my work was informed by a strong attachment to places, and to some people — like friendship, for instance. That my work wasn’t just decorated by the world around us, but it was written by someone who was well informed about it, and was seeking a greater empathy with it. They would be able to make connections between my feelings for places and sometimes people, and their own for such places. So they would see me as giving tongue to some of their own thoughts and what they see. Also, I’m searching within myself for what it is that I either like about something or dislike about something.

GS: And is it the poetry writing that allows you do do that, or is that examining and rumination just a constant part of your nature?
BT: Partly by my nature, but I do not know when I start out where I’m going to get to. Poems are triggered by all manner of things: sometimes a phrase, or someone trying to sell me health insurance over the phone. Or I may be outside, just walking by the river or fishing and a mood will come upon me.

GS: Can you see that the language that Brian Turner’s poetry is constructed with is a particular and unique language; do you see your language as being separate and different to other poets?
BT: I’ve never thought much about that. I like language that seems to be rhythmical to my ear, musical to my ear. If I can’t read something aloud and make it sound okay, then I think there’s usually something wrong.

GS: Do you always know what your work means?
BT: Well, I can make a fair job of explaining it, but I would not like to have to explain it because there are several ways of approaching or interpreting quite a few of the things I’ve done and I’m happy if that’s the case.

GS: At the end of the laureateship, which this publication marks, are you living a life, and I quote, "of too little gladness and too much grief" (see Jaques Afterlife in Footfall)?
BT: There have been times when that is exactly what I have lived. I’ve been trying to tip the balance in the other direction. I’m feeling better about certain things and about myself now than I have been in quite a while.

GS: How long is "a while"?
BT: Probably the last year or two. For a whole host of reasons I struggle with — my temperament is such that some people would say that I go through lows, which I don’t induce. Some people would say I have a fairly high up-and-down range — there are times when I’ve been profoundly depressed and I’ve tried to get myself out of it and learn how to do that. I think I have a better hold on it now.

New Zealand Geographic, September-October 2004

'Slow art in the Maniototo' A conversation with Grahame Sydney

How did your involvement with the Maniototo begin?
When I was 13 or 14 my parents built a little crib in Arrowtown, where we went for holidays. Getting there from Dunedin usually meant going the fast way through Lawrence and Roxburgh into the only landscape that was considered worth seeing - the Lakes district. But sometimes Dad would get it into his heaad - against an overall protest from the family - to go the boring way through the Pigroot. Those journeys were my first exposure to the Maniototo. Through them I became aware of the magnificent vast empty interior of Otago.

And the Maniototo suits slow art?
Very much so, and slow people. In places like this, where there is so little going on, you feel very much more acutely your own insignificance. And that's essential for me. I love the fact that in places like this Nature keeps winning. Whereas in places like Queenstown and Wanaka commerce pretends to have the upper hand. Indeed, is ruinously demonstrating it. The beauty of the Maniototo is elusive, and its that elusiveness that I love the idea of trying to find. My role in life, I think, has become one of trying to find beauty where others don't find it. By turning common things into art your add beauty to the world. Elevate the ordinary, I heard someone call it. Those two elements, the inward journey of what I do and the looking for beauty in unexpected places - making beautiful what nature hasn't necessarily made beautiful - I think that's me in a nutshell these days.

Otago Daily Times, 11 March 2004

Sydney Landscape Limited Edition Label, by John Galbraith

They say wine-making is an art — and with Grahame Sydney involved, that claim is beyond doubt. A painting by the Dunedinbased artist, well-known for his depictions of the Central Otago/ Maniototo landscape, graces the labels of the newly released limited edition Central Otago 2002 Celebration Pinot Noir.

Sydney was at the Carrick Winery in Bannockburn yesterday to check the finished result of his handiwork. He said he had liked the idea of an artist doing the label and had had no reservations about doing the job.

“I was very flattered to be invited, in fact.”

Only one barrel of the wine was made and people bid for futures on it at the Central Otago Pinot Noir Celebration auction in 2002. The auction raised about $30,000 for the barrel, which averages about $110 a bottle, and part of the proceeds went to the Otago Polytechnic’s Cromwell campus.

Sydney said he was “a great lover of pinots”. “I think we do it beautifully [in Central Otago].”

However, he joked he was too poor to afford such special wine.

The label art was a watercolour version of his well-known Pig Root Pond oil painting from about 10 years ago. Sydney said painting a label was different from his regular work, as it had to both attract attention on the shelf and allow some space for information about the wine.

“It was quite a hard thing to find an image that would still be mine but would allow those two functions.”

He said it had proved a challenge as he was not a commercial artist used to such concerns.

“I found it actually quite worrying, because I had stepped into that other area where I don’t normally live.”

2005 Celebration chairman Duncan Forsyth said the wine had been blended from the best wine of 25 different wineries in the region, and the idea behind the limited edition was to both celebrate the region’s wine and raise money for worthy Central Otago organisations and activities.

Previous years’ limited edition labels had been designed by artists Ralph Hotere and Andrew Drummond, and next year’s would be done by Bill Hammond.

Dunedin Art Gallery, 27 February 2004

Speech by Grahame Sydney, Spencer in Dunedin 'Everyday Miracles'

On a personal note first of all, may I say what an honour it is to have Stanley Spencer’s daughter, Unity, here with us tonight.

As if having a Spencer show in Dunedin is not enough, it is an occasion made all the more significant by your presence tonight, Unity, and a particular pleasure for me to be able to say that I have now met both of Stanley’s daughters here in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery: an “everyday miracle” for me.

One of the first reproductions of an art work I ever pinned to my bedroom wall, the bedroom I pretended was my first ever studio as a schoolboy in the 1960’s, was Michael Smither’s painting “St Francis in Ecstasy in the Garden of Eden”, carefully torn from the NZ Women’s Weekly. In the accompanying article Michael paid his great respects to the English painter whose work and example had given him the courage to try to be an artist: Stanley Spencer.

I went searching for this Spencer, and found him hiding in one or two books upstairs in the Moray Place Public Library. I immediately removed those books on permanent renewal, and felt real irritation towards anyone who interrupted my possession with loan requests of their own.

That admiration, now well into its 4th decade, has never faltered – for either me or Michael Smither. We have both made the closest thing either of us will ever get to Religious Pilgrimages to Cookham, stood in front of Fernlea and the Church, walked its tiny High Street and recognised its high brick walls, had our photographs taken on the bridge over the sluggish Thames. It’s a form of worship by ageing painters, and I’m proud of it.

I still have several Spencer postcards near me when I work, and on my studio wall a black and white photograph of Stanley drawing in the Glasgow Shipyards during WW2 has kept me company for many years.

Spencer’s example and influence on painters around the world has been immeasurable, and I derive great satisfaction from knowing that a painter who was so utterly saturated in the pageant of his own life and beloved, small corner of the world – and who was so determinedly unaffected by the surging tides of international art movements and fashions throughout his life, should now be so internationally recognised and celebrated.

Spencer was a gloriously complicated man, but put simply his preoccupations were two-fold, and both are nicely represented in this exhibition:

The First, and most compelling to me, was his unashamed fascination with himself, his unfolding life and spiritual beliefs. Who else could write (1922) “of course I love myself more than anybody…. I collect Stanley Spencer’s just as George collects stamps…. I love myself in much the same way as a baby loves a tin soldier.”

Who else could seriously plan a “Church of Me” which would be a Cathedral of Memory, with separate wings devoted to paintings of the important women in his life?

And who else could write later of his “pining to get home and back to that happy realm of thinking about myself – my special brew of thoughts when all the Stanleys, this me and that me, can come out like children coming out of school.”

Spencer was blessed with a wonderful conviction that he was witness to the miracle of everyday living. While much of his work was from memory, “a reclamation and contemplation of his own past”, and focused intently upon his fabulous imaginings of the Biblical and Gospel stories happening in Cookham, with recognisable Cookham characters as stars in the on-going revelations, there was at the same time another preoccupation: the “potboilers,” frequently disparaged by the man himself.

These were the bread and butter of simple survival; but they were much more than that – his catalogue of Cookham’s landscape - lovingly, scrupulously observed and painted with rare patience. These are the FACT paintings, where the others are the IMAGINING works, but they reveal his delight in and respect for the sheer visual luxury of things: pattern, detail, variety, colour, texture.

Far more than most, he was alert to this visual richness, and it thrilled him:

“Cooped up as I am in myself, I gaze out on my own chicken run and feel I could write a chapter on each ridge of mud, or scratched hole, or nettle, or claw mark. I prefer to have no greater world.”

The mystery and magic of life and living.

In this exhibition we can stand in front of one of the greatest paintings of the C20th, Spencer’s oversized “Self Portrait” begun just before the outbreak of WW1. He was 23 and he painted it in the charmingly named “Wisteria Cottage”, which he rented as a studio from Jack Hatch, the local coalman. He had hardly spent a night away from Fernlea, the Cookham High St home his grandfather had built.

If I was allowed to steal one painting from the Tate Gallery and get away with it, I’d steal this self portrait.

Beside this assured and monumental 1914 work you’ll see another of the same man, now much reduced, and 45 years older. It’s a dreadfully honest painting: he has cancer and will be dead in 2 months. We can stand in front of it now just as he did in 1959: we see him as he saw himself – unconcerned, unbrushed, uncensored.

He does not look afraid of dying – indeed it may be, according to his daughter today, that he did not know he was. But after all, this was a man who believed that on Judgment Day everyone would be resurrected, saints and sinners alike. The idea of Heaven had always excited him, and he’d happily imagined it would be no different to Cookham. All his life he’d painted miracles happening in his own back yard. This is the face, I should add, of a man who had just recently been Knighted by his Queen.

They make a brilliant pair, these two works, bookends to the story of an uncommon and truly marvellous life told in 50 years of paint.

As one who believes that one of the fundamental purposes and appeals of great art is the extent to which it ushers us into the exclusive domain of what it’s like being someone else, Spencer’s compulsion to show and tell, as he once said, “to tell everybody everything”, and to do so with extraordinary craft and confidence, is something millions of people the world over are profoundly grateful for -–myself and Mr Smither included.

He was a rare and fascinating individual, and his paintings show us all precisely how rare and fascinating one life, lived so intensely and exuberantly, can be.

It’s a privilege to have these works in this gallery, and a privilege to have Unity Spencer in our company tonight, herself, unsurprisingly, an artist too.

My appreciation also to the staff of the DPAG – to you, Priscilla, for the work done getting this exhibition together, and to you Justin for the beautiful and lucid writing, as always.

Our thanks are due to you all for doing us the huge favour of enjoying Stanley Spencer in our own village, half a world away.

Scoop, February 2004

'Timeless Land, Southern Sinfonia'

Grahame Sydney’s art was showcased in a spectacular way at the Dunedin Arts and Cultural Events this month, February 2004. “Timeless Land" featured the world premiere performance of a very special new multi-artform work, showcasing the very best of Otago's art and artists expressing their feelings towards their land: Grahame Sydney, Brian Turner, Owen Marshall, Anthony Ritchie and NHNZ (Natural History New Zealand).

The work consisted of new orchestral music composed by Anthony Ritchie performed by the Southern Sinfonia with soprano soloist Deborah Wai Kapohe, along with the screening of Grahame Sydney's paintings and specially compiled film by NHNZ.

Brian Turner and Owen Marshall read from their writings during the performance which was under the baton of Southland-born conductor Ken Young.

ODT December 31, 2003

'Grahame Sydney, Dunedin, ONZM, services to painting'

A career as an artist stretching almost 30 years had only been possible because people had the courage to support his endeavours, Grahame Sydney (55) said yesterday.

"If nothing else, what it really shows when people like me get an award like this, is that New Zealand arts patronage has the courage to back its own."

Without that support, the nation's culture, in its myriad forms, could not survive.

There was also some satisfaction because it showed being a staunch regionalist had not been too great a limitation after all, Sydney said.

He has become synonymous with his realist interpretations of the Southern landscape since first exhibiting in the Moray Gallery in 1972.

Since then, his paintings in oil, watercolour and egg tempera have exhibited to acclaim throughout New Zealand and in Australia. He is also a printmaker and works in pencil on paper and with charcoal.

His works are held in the collections of New Zealand's major galleries, including Te Papa's national collection.

In 1978, he was the Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago.

More recently, his book, The Art of Grahame Sydney, took a hat trick of prizes at the Montana Book Awards in 2000, picking up the readers' choice award, the non-fiction medal and illustrative arts prize.

Sunday Star Times November 30, 2003

'Treading in the icy footprints of Robert Scott', Grahame Sydney

Scott's first hut, tiny, wooden and thin, still sits on a small black headland nearby. Not for them the comforts of the hot tub, the sauna, the soft warm beds and the morning shower, the instant emails, the phone calls home, the shop, the hydroponic room, the generators.

The paradoxes are startling and inescapable. Starting with the local geology: this island is volcanic - molten rock amid the ice ocean; Erebus steams away still behind us, a hot water cauldron at the height of Mt Cook, its 4000-metre head mostly in the clouds.

The painful glare of the snow, too much for any squint to cope with, is splattered with beautiful dark chocolate slashes and dribbles of rich, almost black exposed volcanic scoria, barren and blasted like a lunar surface.

It is lifeless, sharp and hard - the dusts have all blown away from here. Scott Base, McMurdo, Discovery Hut; all sit on raw, sterile rock, black ink stains on a vast white blotter.

It's a white world, surreal and hostile. The cold is exhilerating - for about two minutes - then dangerous. Nature is basically trying to kill you here and offers nothing but snow, ice, stone and the weather.

Winds turn a tolerable (with 15cm of insulated extreme weather clothing) minus 12 degrees C into an instantly insufferable, achingly debilitating -25 degrees C hell, and it happens within minutes.face muscles tighten and numb and I talk like a stroke victim, unable to form the words. One minute exposed and my fingers shriek with acute pain, both in the freezing and the thawing. It is all snow and ice and wind but "snowing" is uncommon. Many on base have never seen it snow.

And for all the snow and ice, dehydration is a constant, indoors and out: dry mouth, sandpaper throat, everyone toting water bottles, sipping can. No water vapour, in fact no water anywhere I've seen so far. No bacteria either: unable to wash dishes - we only wipe 'em off with paper towels, any residue freezes to the plate anyway and is not a worry.

The surreal nature of life here is typified by the ice shelf, 100 metres give or take, itself a lifeless, colourless, rough, wind-planed grainy surface, inhospitable to living things. Beneath the shelf however is a marine environment as rich, diverse and colourful as any temperate ocean and an endless delight to scientists.

ODT November 25, 2003

'None of the sops can atone for the crime'

GRAHAME SYDNEY, artist, and patron of Waitaki First, declares some of his reasons for believing the proposed Project Aqua on the Waitaki River to be an unforgivable mistake.

Let's face some facts: Meridian is a commercial enterprise attempting to stay in business. Its business is not to teach New Zealanders how to use electricity more sensibly, or more efficiently - that's someone else's business. Meridian's business is to make the stuff, then sell it to us for a profit. Nor is it Meridian's business to worry about how the landscape of this country looks, either now or in the future. The face of the earth is Meridian's raw material, and permanent scars on that face are simply the price to be paid for Meridian to remain in business and keep the profits coming.

Without that support, the nation's culture, in its myriad forms, could not survive.

To pretend or imply that this is the best way to generate new power to meet future demand is simply wrong, and deliberately misleading. It is not the best way. It may be the way Meridian thinks it can profit best; it may be best for engineers and planners, because monumental schemes always excite engineers and planners; it may be best for men in faraway offices to gouge their names forever into the geography of the South, lasting evidence of their own significance and status, visible in satellite shots from 300km into space, their own version of China's Great Wall. But it is NOT the best way to cater for future demand for electricity.

Has nothing been learned from the disaster of the Clyde dam? Am I alone in regarding the loss of the Cromwell Gorge, the loss of the marvellous Clutha above Cromwell bridge, the loss of the unique orchards, the arrival of Ministry of Works suburbia in the township, all as a terrible mistake?

Let us not, ten years hence, find ourselves wishing this had never happened, as many do with the Upper Clutha. Let us not, ten years hence, find ourselves staring at the awful canal cleaving the Waitaki in two and wish we'd done more to say "no". It's a terrible feeling, looking back and wishing you'd done more, when it's too late . . . and you're staring at a shockingly scarred face, knowing it's a lifetime after lifetime sentence, and could have been prevented.

Please remember: we are not owners of this earth, these landscapes. We are nothing more than brief occupiers, caretakers charged with its maintenance and well-considered nurture. What we do to the landscape becomes the legacy our children and theirs inherit. This project is a 60km-long, straight-edged, six-storey high gutter subdividing the river valley like a giant Berlin Wall, filled to the brim with a sluggish flow wide enough for a ship or two, and leaving a sad and pathetic once-was-beautiful braided, natural riverbed dead and overgrown to one side. If you think this is going to add beauty to our southern land, and be a valuable legacy, then I am indeed from Mars.

It is ill-conceived, inappropriate and anachronistic - a monument to short-sightedness, and I have no sympathy whatsoever for those directly involved with delivering it into our midst.

Herald September 9, 2003

'The Chills', T.J. McNamara

Central Otago painter Grahame Sydney is off to the bottom of the world to paint slightly less hospitable landscapes as part of the Antarctica New Zealand Invitational Arts Fellow Programme. Sydney says he has long been fascinated by the land and the explorers who struggled with its unforgiving environment.

He sees the visit as "a chance to investigate what this final continent might offer me, besides being a challenging theatre for the heroic dramas I've loved for so many years." Sydney flies to the Antarctic in November, the start of the continent's brief "summer".

ODT August 22, 2003

'Summer trip to inspire work', Jane Smith>

Grahame Sydney will be spending some of his summer in the Antarctic this year.

“Mr Sydney was invited to spend two weeks in the Antarctic in November as part of Antarctica New Zealand's Invitational Arts Fellow programme and "did not have to think about it" before accepting.

"It's so unwordly and everyone who goes there finds it totally thrilling," he said.

Typically, he gathered notes and sketches on-site for paintings he later did in his studio, and he needed to find out how best to do that in subzero temperatures.

"One has images of water colour freezing on to brushes and ending up with a pencil," he said.

He was looking forward to "the variations in whiteness. The absolute minimal quality of land form itself, just leaving you with a visual range of, I presume, extraordinary subtlety based around whiteness. I love that notion because that's where I very much like to work - between abstraction and reality."

It would be "a test" to see if he could capture that subtlety but "that's the challenge that I accept with some excitement".

Listener July 5, 2003

'Cover story' Chris Hunter

“For a lot of people, the cover clinches the purchase. So are local book covers any good? The annual Spectrum Print Book Design Awards are supposed to answer that question, and give New Zealand designers some exposure.

A year ago, though, the same publisher [Random House] released three good covers in quick succession – and all three were shortlisted for best fiction at the Montana awards. Janet Hunt used Grahame Sydney’s painting “Drought, North Otago” (1989) to beguiling effect for Owen Marshall’s When Gravity Snaps.

The covers of New Zealand poetry books are generally better. The necessary sense of mystery is often pushed into the realm of other-worldliness, with delicate or heavily cropped images that invite investigation. Brian Turner’s Taking Off is one example which was a winner of last year’s award.”

This suggests that the publishers give designers more freedom with poetry, and the number of poetry books commended in the awards reflects the higher quality.”

Herald July 5, 2003

'Who's hot in NZ art' Angela Gregory

Major artists - deceased: Chevalier, Alfred Sharpe, and John Gully, Colin McCahon, Lois White, Rita Angus, Gordon Walters, Evelyn Page, Frances Hodgkins, Charles Goldie, Tony Fomison, Toss Woollaston, Ted Bullmore, Russell Clark, Len Lye, Christopher Perkins and Allen Maddox.

Senior, and now practising: Bill Hammond, Dick Frizzell, Don Binney, Stanley Palmer, Robin White, Pat Hanly, Michael Smither, Grahame Sydney, Don Driver, Max Gimblett, Peter Siddell, Raymond Ching, Jeffrey Harris, Milan Mrkusich, Michael Shepherd, Gretchen Albrecht, Mervyn Williams, Geoff Thornley, Terry Stringer, Billy Apple, Brent Wong, Gavin Chilcott, Robert Ellis, Stephen Bambury, Denys Watkins, Tony Lane, Neil Dawson, Greer Twiss and Richard Killeen.

Listener January 18, 2003

'As the day we were born', Grahame Sydney

Our moral guardians have worked hard – and very often successfully – to make the nude an outlawed figure in New Zealand art history.

It is an intriguing fact, then, that for all the art being made in this country, so little of it employs the human figure, and even less of it that figure naked. Why so?

The tradition of the nude in art’s history is long and honourable, as Sandra Chesterman points out in the introductory chapter of her overview of the part that life modelling and the nude have played in the evolution of New Zealand’s art.

In general, however, Figure Work happily achieves its modest aims, which are “to widen the area of discussion a little and to raise awareness of some aspects of life modelling and the depiction of the nude in the Western tradition and New Zealand art.” It’s a good start, and it contains some memorable lesser-known images; but so many fine New Zealand figure paintings remain unseen still, and only publications will lift the smokescreen, revealing them as they should be revealed, private parts and all.

Listener December 14, 2002

'The Shed', Roy Colbert

Sydney's 1975 painting of the Wedderburn railway goods shed, "July on the Maniototo" really put the tiny village on the map. Other tiny Central Otago villages, such as St Bathans, population five, were once huge, with 13 hotels and thousands of residents, but Wedderburn has always been tiny.

Local fanner Stu Duncan lives in the delightfully named White Sow Valley. I ask him the population of Wedderburn. He carefully counts the adults out loud, in twos, like a man who knows every member of every house. He stops at 34.

All the more reason, then, to treasure the Sydney painting and all that it stands for. Like the shed it is of, which the locals tendered for when the railway line was pulled up and missed out on by $100. This year they raised $20,000 to haul it back from Idaburn, where it had been used to store coal. The journey on the 16-wheeler alone took nearly $6000 of it, and much of the rest will go on restoration and lining its walls with historical pieces...

Sydney agrees. He plays down the extent to which the painting has made the village famous, and is happier for the shed to be back in place simply for what it is, a reminder of a kind of life that is disappearing, of a rural railway that is no more.

"The wonderful image I have of that shed is when the train from Dunedin would stop on a Friday night and the school boarders going home for the week-end would race out and hurtle through the open door of the shed, which was further along the tracks, and try to get back into the train before it set off again."

The shed, now 200m from its original spot and, temporarily, a little worse for wear, will eventually be a quintessential Central Otago moment for the tourist buses now increasingly choosing the Maniototo route.

I seek out long-established Wedderburn resident Stu Duncan.

"This is the way rural New Zealand used to be," he says, his dark features breaking slowly into an inimitable wide grin.

"You know, you can take all your fancy gadgets, your technology things, your Sky television. Forget them. You can come down here, fish, swim, have a round of golf and a drink. This is what life really is."

Otago Daily Times April 27, 2002

'Art needs arrogance - painter', Debbie Jamieson

A ferocious arrogance was one of the key attributes an artist should have, Otago painter Grahame Sydney told about 300 photographers in Queenstown yesterday. In fact, Sydney should have a sign on his own studio door reading, "Impregnable Ego At Work. Don't Disturb", he said.

Art, whether it was a painting or a photograph, could only be good if it contained the artist's own unique and unmistakable autograph and he loathed imitators. What should be apparent was "the importance of valuing what life has done to you, and what your personality is, and what your chemistry is, and what your experiences have been and how those experiences have affected your signature", he said. Sydney was always fascinated by painting and although the reason why remained a mystery, it was a part of him.

Central Otago and Dunedin were also a part of him and he would only go the North Island (which he said he loathed) to visit friends from Dunedin. "Whenever I'm away I feel worse and whenever I come back and look over the Waitaki I feel better and I can't explain that - that's just me." Although he felt slightly troubled to say it, he told the audience he could not stand Queenstown.

However, he once owned a 10-acre block of land at Dalefield, which he bought with borrowed money for $20,000 in the 1970s, before anyone had built a house there. "With the perfect economic vision which has plagued my life, I sold it three years later for $23,000 and thought I'd done rather well. "I gather I couldn't buy it now for half a million," he said.

But the Queenstown landscape was "just not me", unlike the "big, open, desolate, empty" landscapes of Central Otago. "It has taken me a great deal of time to accept the fact that this is who I am. In fact, it's rather fascinating being me." It was to his "horror" a student had begun a PhD on him and was investigating the Freudian aspects of his imagery, including why things were often hanging limply in his paintings. "Buggered if I know," he said. "The reasons the paintings are like this is because I'm like this."

Herald April 20, 2002

'Art world has little sympathy for miffed buyer', Linda Herrick

Did an investor get what he deserved when his Helen Clark painting was revealed as fake, and is charity art getting out of hand?

Leading art-world figures yesterday brushed off Henry van Dijk's outrage over the $1000 Helen Clark painting that turned out to be the work of someone else.

Some said he deserved disappointment, particularly because he has an arts retail diploma.

"This is a beautiful art story," said Otago-based painter Grahame Sydney. "It has everything - greed, charity, mystery, famous people and fools.

"A trained art retailer buys an appalling piece of paint and hopes a change in public status of the name on the back will make him some money.

"So much for charity. He should be happy to have got Helen's signature for only $1000."

Sydney said art did not necessarily equate with quality at charity events.

"If you're going to buy art for investment or to protect your money, you ought to be making sure you're buying quality," he said.

"You're not going to find that at a charity auction unless the work is created by an artist. If it was investment that was his motivation, he deserves to be disappointed. No one would look at a painting like that and spend $1000 on it with a view to its increasing value unrelated to the quality of the art."

The Press April 19, 2002

'Celebration of artist's life and works suggested', Marjorie Cook

Frances Hodgkins' birthday on April 28 should become an annual celebration in Dunedin, gallery owner Marshall Seifert and artist Grahame Sydney say. The renowned painter was born in Dunedin in 1869. She lived in Europe and England, where she died in 1947, for most of her adult life. The Dunedin City Council and Dunedin Public Art Gallery are celebrating her birthday on April 28 this year with a one-off cocktail function. It includes a top-secret "special announcement", the opening of a small Hodgkins display and the unveiling of a gift from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. When contacted this week, Mr Seifert and Mr Sydney said they had suggested an annual Hodgkins birthday celebration to Dunedin Mayor Sukhi Turner at a January meeting. They were disappointed to hear nothing more until they received invitations last week.

"We are very pleased to see something is being done on her birthday and hope we had something to do with it," Mr Seifert said. They also said the council should help arrange a suitable display of her life's story.

"It has to be a decent corner, not a wardrobe, that is devoted to her in a significant way," Mr Sydney said.

To Mr Seifert and Mr Sydney's knowledge, Dunedin has never claimed a notable person on behalf of the town. Scottish poet Robbie Burns did not count because he did not live here. It was not right for just the gallery to acknowledge Hodgkins. "We believe it to be a civic matter first and an art gallery matter second," Mr Seifert said. Interest in Hodgkins was increasing as New Zealanders began to value their culture more. Dunedin should not be ashamed of celebrating Hodgkins because she did not return to New Zealand to live out her last days, Mr Sydney said. Hodgkins' father, William Mathew Hodgkins, founded the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, the University of Otago has a fellowship named after her and the Hocken Library holds the Hodgkins family history. "It is all there. It just needs some will from the city," Mr Seifert said.

Dunedin City Council community life general manager Graeme Hall said, when contacted yesterday, Mr Seifert and Mr Sydney "certainly raised the idea of the birthday" and the council was now holding such an occasion.

Southland Museum March 5, 2002

'Grahame Sydney Exhibition Draws Crowds', Press Release

The Grahame Sydney Exhibition 'On The Road' has been drawing large crowds at Southland Museum & Art Gallery.

With standing space only for his first series of floor talks, the nationally recognised Otago artist is returning for a further series of floor talks. Museum Programmes Manager, Maurice Watson said "The first series of floor talks drew some of the biggest crowds the Museum has ever had for such presentations with over 350 people present. Grahame has agreed to come back and do two more floor talks specifically for students and one for the public" Mr Watson said this was a rare opportunity for people to listen to the artists and ask him questions about his art work.

There has been a huge amount of interest in Sydney's art works with the Museum having to reorder additional copies of the catalogue twice as stocks were snapped up.

The Press February 1, 2002

'Do nothing message for Kiwis', Gail Goodger

Feel like doing absolutely nothing today?
Go ahead.
The Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand has made your day - by declaring today national "absolutely nothing" day, to encourage Kiwis to spend at least 15 minutes daily relaxing for their mental well-being. Otago artist Grahame Sydney said he never really has 15 minutes to kick back but in his dream world, he imagines relaxing in his quiet living room. "There are cherished art works littering the walls, bookshelves drooping with the cluttered weight of accumulated impulsive purchases and me sunk into a chubby, overweight armchair or couch taking time to read," he said.

The Press January 19, 2002

'It isn't easy seeing green', Features Story

Something is wrong in Grahame Sydney's Central Otago. Instead of its normal sere, dun hues, the famously expansive and empty landscape has an unnatural green tinge to it.

It is the legacy of a most indifferent and damp start to summer in what is normally the South Island's oven. And Sydney is frustrated. "I hate green," he says, as yet more misty cloud obscures the Hawkdun range across the valley from his Maniototo home. "Its not the Central I know and love. Mine is a much browner and paler place."

It is not the only thing that is not quite right in Sydney's world just now. He has come through a quite remarkable if not entirely comfortable year, one which has seen his name and his distinctive regional, realist style become as well known as probably any contemporary artist could hope to be in their lifetime in this country.

But despite the growing audience and acclaim a major touring exhibition and book have brought him, it has been an unsettling time.

Getting his new house and studio in the Cambrian Valley built has been demanding, although the result is as good an indication as any of the obvious financial success Sydney has found with his art.

Other things have interfered and he is clearly keen to restore some discipline and focus to the need to produce more major works (he has immediate demands for half a dozen).

"It's been a remarkably valuable year for me, professionally speaking, in that I would never have imagined the amount of interest being taken in what I've been doing all that time," he says.

"It's all been very terrific and distracting. You find yourself becoming a public person in a way that you don't necessarily want to be. But ... you have got to play that role."

There is some apparent irony, too, for a man who specialises in representing the great unpopulated isolation of the region. Spending days or weeks at a time in a place where no people are evident, except for a distant road, always working and mostly living alone, he is feeling the isolation and the inevitable constant harping self-analysis that solitary confinement brings.

He is determined that human company will play a bigger part in his life from now on.

So, he is happy to share his time generously with a passing journalist, despite garden chores beckoning and pending visits from family and friends, including today his good friend Sam Neill. And, particularly, he is happy to talk about Central.

He can talk wisely and in detail about history and places. He has strong opinions about its politics and development. He speaks with venom and hatred of the Clyde Dam, with frustration at the loss of the railway line, with anger at the development of Queenstown. He predicts great things for the local wine industry. And, most of all, he enthuses about the land.

For those even vaguely familiar with his art, it is hard not to travel the place and think of any particular scene "that looks like a Grahame Sydney painting".

He smiles and says he hears that, too, and quite likes it.

He is an artist who unashamedly paints for himself and no-one else. The success, it seems, is a happy by-product but, "its nice having the thought that people's appreciation is enhanced by what you have done".

He will allow that he has probably contributed a little to the rapidly rising appeal Central seems to hold for the rest of the country, but he is not getting carried away.

Beer advertising probably has a bigger part to play, he argues.

But he is pleased it is getting recognised, including via his representations of this unforgiving, hard world – a land of extremes and of nature spread taut and thin. A place of beauty that people often do not expect and may not even recognise until, perhaps, they see it in a Grahame Sydney painting.

The Press January 9, 2002

'Bone of Contention', John Coley

Grahame Sydney constructed his personal vision from early observations of his Otago homelands, by later exploring every road traversing the Maniototo Plain, through epic morning jogs in the hills of Tarras, and by numberless, careful drawings, which were later melded by skill, experience, and emotion into images which we recognise as his alone whether we are moved by them or not.

His imitator meanwhile derives his "vision" from the scrutiny of Sydney's paintings. His polished technique may persuade some that these works are the equal of the originals.

With an orginal, you are connected directly to the artist's thought processes. You follow a creative mind at work. The imitation confonts us with a blankness behind the work; an exercise in another individual's style as sincerely felt as a forged signature...

Originality is a hard journey. Imitation hitches a ride. Join me then in raising a hand in salute to the truly original artists amongst us and, with the other, give a thumbs down to those who ride on their coat tails.

NZ Listener October 13, 2001

'Spitting Images. The fine art of imitating Grahame Sydney', Linda Herrick

At the foot of the stairs of art retailers Fishers Fine Arts in Parnell, Auckland, stands a large landscape painting, "Approaching 95 at Maryburn", signposting the entrance to an exhibition upstairs. A couple walk through the door and exclaim, "Look, there's a Grahame Sydney." As they move closer, they bemusedly examine the painting's signature. Geoff Williams.

Anyone who has read the book The Art of Grahame Sydney (three-time winner in the 2000 Montana Book Awards), or attended his public gallery talks or engaged with his paintings, will be familiar with the intensive meditative process Sydney goes through to produce his work, which is also renowned as technically superb. He completes about six paintings a year, and destroys any that don't meet his exacting standards. On the other hand, a series of conversations with Williams - who acknowledges he is colourblind - present a dispiriting picture: "a lot of it is just really good illustrations"; "nothing earth-shattering"; "I had to paint paintings I could make a living from"; "I'm quite proud of them, not for their artistic sake, but because I've been able to make a good living"; "I'm now painting less because they're getting good prices and I don't have to focus on volume anymore"; "I've never been able to connect with the landscape and I haven't been that interested in it, either"; "I've made a few bob from the boats."

Art critic Keith Stewart: "You'd have to say, buyer beware, and anybody who's buying it in terms of it being an investment I would predict is in serious trouble. If what Williams is doing was being done in print, in the sense that someone wrote a novel that was such a straightforward copy of style and content, as these paintings are, I would suggest there'd be a court case very quickly. Grahame's not losing any business by it, but this guy is living off the talent of others and that annoys me intensely."

In the end, says Sydney, history is the best judge - the truth is in comparing the paintings. "It is fascinating and sad," says Sydney, "that someone who has apparently been painting fulltime for a decade is so profoundly blind to art's complexities and mysteries, sees it as mere commerce. Quality in art does not consist of doing what someone else has done, nor simply formulaic repetition of boats with reflections, models on beds, objects on shelves, sheds in the landscape, and reproducing the photographs with a signwriter's methods. Neither does a sale equate with success, Williams may well have been a successful signwriter. He is now the country's most expensive one."

NZ Listener August 2001

'Living for the City', Bruce Ansley

But where do they (Aucklanders) live in their hearts, assuming for the moment that they have them? Somewhere else, in the Auckland Art Gallery's experience.

Hordes of them have been rediscovering themselves before Grahame Sydney¯s intense landscapes at the gallery. "This exhibition is so hugely popular, hugely, hugely," swoons one of the gallery staff. Which is curious because Sydney paints Otago, especially Central Otago, and his is an empty landscape without people.

"Maybe they believe that¯s what the heartland is," says gallery director Chris Saines. "They know it in their hearts if not through actual experience."

Saines notices a different kind of art lover dreaming before Sydney¯s paintings. "They are striking a chord with ordinary New Zealanders as opposed to the highly educated audience which is interested in art." Sydney has scored beyond the cool. But his heartland only looks barren. In a note on the gallery wall, Brian Turner, southern poet, observes that Sydney¯s work is more about people staying than people leaving. Perhaps that is what appeals.

NZ Herald, July 2, 2001

'Landscapes of the heart', T.J. McNamara

We love landscape. The landscape paintings of Grahame Sydney are drawing almost unprecedented crowds at the Auckland Art Gallery and this week a string of exhibitions incorporate landscape.

They are all remarkably different because no artist paints lanscape just to show what it looks like - photography specatacularly takes care of that. Instead the landscape becomes the vehicle for the painter's ideas and feeling. The landscape that carries the meaning must be painted in such a way that we can all identify with it.

House and Garden July 2001

'Landscape', Prue Dashfield

On a stark Otago hilltop, Grahame Sydney watched in wonderment as a work of art gradually appeared in a space defined by a few pegs and odd lengths of string. The creative process utterly absorbed him - the idea, the outline, the slow, laborious realisation.

Most of us call this sequence of events "construction". Grahame Sydney calls it "awe-inspiring" and considers the artistry of the architect, builder and tradesment responsible for his ne house near St Bathans to be every bit the equal of his own - though far less feted and rewarded...

"I love the fact that here, more than anywhere, I am award of two things. The first is that history is apparent... The second is that it's geographically and geologically raw, a landscape of bare bones rather than comfort, and it makes me very aware of my insignificance. The permanent and immutable elements of the earth's crust seem to be more obvious and it makes you feel even more transitory. When it's this big you feel very small and I like that. It's what fuels my engines in a way because the work that I do is the only way I can guarantee my permanence. The more transitory and fleeting I know my life is, the more award I am of the timelessness of this."

His work is in definance of mortality. A slab of Oamaru stone above the fireplace will eventually bear the inscription Ars Longa, Vita Brevis - art is long, life is short.

There was no question that it would be designed by old school friend and Auckland architect Graeme Smith... Graeme Smith designed a village-like cluster of chunky, hefty buildings - house, garage and studio - intended to reflect the earthy solidity of the miners' construction techniques and withstand the frequent visits of a screaming north-west wind...

Grahame is highly pleased with the geometry of the house, "the way it creates abstractions". He studies the juxtaposition of a triangular shadow on a wall and the blue sky and brown hills beside and beyond it. "That looks likd a conbination of an abstract and a realist painting."

City Scene Sunday July 1, 2001, Issue 25

'Art Gallery Numbers Up and Up'

Not many organisations can claim a 125% increase in business, but that's exactly what has happened at the Auckland Art Gallery this year. More than 214,000 visitors have walked through its doors during the first five months of this year ì more than doubling the annual estimate. Local artists have been the drawcard, the latest being Grahame Sydney. Five thousand people descended on the (Grahame Sydney) exhibition during its first weekend and there¯s been a steady stream of visitors to the show ever since.

The National Business Review, June 29, 2001

'Regionalist Artist Captures Auckland Audience with Ethereal Landscapes', John Daly-Peoples

Grahame Sydney inhabits a strange position within the New Zealand art scene. He has been a successful and prolific artist for over 25 years and now commands high prices ($30,000-50,000) for his workds and has enough commissions to last him for several years to come. His work, however, is rarely seen, with only one dealer gallery show in Auckland the past 15 years...

He is often marginalised because he is a regional painter on the edge of the known art world. Now internationally, it is often those artists on the edge, the boudary riders, who are being included in the definitions of contemporary art. Sydney¯s great achievement is not in his realistic depiction of the landscape but his ability to convey its spiritual, ethereal and historical dimensionsò While his paintings are generally without people and only occasionally with some sign of habitation or man¯s intrusion into the environment there is always a sense of narrative, of a before or an after to the event we are witnessingò The landscapes with their road signs and intersections speak of a splendid loneliness and emptiness but also of a future about to unfold like the scene from Hitchcock¯s North by Northwest in which Cary Grant stands alone on the road by the silent wheat fields.

Otago Daily Times, June 14, 2001

'Much interest in exhibition', Marjorie Cook

Auckland interest is high in Dunedin artist Grahame Sydney's exhibition "On the Road". The Auckland Art Gallery this week reported more than 1500 visitors a day to the exhibition, featuring Central Otago landscapes, which opened on Saturday. As in Christchurch, where more than 12,000 viewed the exhibition at the Centre of Contemporary Art last month, Sydney's work is striking a chord with visitors who rarely go to art galleries. "This show has totally exceeded expectations. There is a huge number of Aucklanders who clearly identify with Sydney and with his landscape. More exciting still, they seem to be a new audience of the gallery," director Chris Saines said in a media release.

NZ Herald, June 11, 2001

'Arts on Monday', T.J. McNamara

The long roads and railway tracks that disappear into the aptly named vanishing point are central to Grahame Sydney's work. He shows no humans, only the geometric signs of human occupancy at odds with the natural variations of the hlls. Signs are important for Sydney.

Road signs figure in many of the works. They are generally seen from the back so their message is unknown, but their presence is real and brooding. In some of the best paintings the signs are covered with cloth and their meaning further veiled. The viewer searches in vain for philosophy in these paintings. They just are.

City Scene Sunday, June 2001

'On the road - Sydney's art'

Grahame Sydney won three Montana Book Awards last year for his publication The Art of Grahame Sydney, now this artist is featured in this winter's premier exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery.

On the Road: paintings by Grahame Sydney opened on June 1 and shows at the gallery until August 26.

Sydney is a South Island artist, whose exhibition, divided into five thematic sections, evokes the regions surrounding Otago - its scenery, roads and railway tracks as well as a selection of portrait and figure studies.

NZ Herald, June 11, 2001

'Masters of the art of illusion show their worth', T.J. McNamara

It's virtuoso week. The virtuosity is in creating illusion. Viewers of art love illusion. The crowds at the City Gallery during Queen's Birthday were exceptional. One factor that attracted them was Grahame Sydney's representation of the southern light of Central Otago. His heartfelt response to the emptiness of this region, which he has made his own, produces what might be called "adagio" paintings, long, slow and melancholy. The most typical show a landscape empty of people, with brown folding hills and an expanse of sky. In the accurate representation there is also a sense of uneasiness that contributes to the particular quality of the work. The vast space of this region is so lonely that in the excellent video that accompanies the exhibition we see the artist working at his painting while straddling the white centre line of a road, secure in the knowledge that he won't be disturbed by a passing car or truck. In addition to delight in how accurately corrugated iron or the light on ponds and hills are painted, what the crowds are getting from these paintings is a sense that they are small counters in a great enigmatic game. It gives a sense of peace. What makes these paintings work on the heart is the feeling of illusionist depiction of floods of light and the consequent shadows. The contrasts between light and dark are beautifully worked, particularly when the light is seen through the geometric opening of window and doorway. These portals, the work of humans, are fragile against the mountains and plains. The work more than bears comparison with similar paintings by such famous names as Andrew Wyeth and Georgia O'Keeffe, but Sydney is the outstanding example here of a regional painter hewing his own trail with single-minded determination and results that have captured the mind of the public.

NZ Herald, June 2, 2001

'Where Southern Man belongs', Michele Hewitson

If there are few people in Sydney's Central Otago images, there are always traces: of people once here in those abandoned buildings and lonely letterboxes; of the painter himself. And, if he has achieved what he most desires to achieve, a transferral of an image into the viewer's heart and mind.

I tell him that I showed the pictures in his book to a friend who grew up in Central Otago and that tears of homesickness, gone unacknowledged for decades, came to her eyes. "Oh, I love that. You see, that's the potency. It's an add-on. Another of those things that I'd never imagined."

...There is a core of something which, without closer attention to detail might look like melancholy running through the deep strata in Sydney. But it is more like, if you peel back the layers a little, a deep seriousness.

You get the impression that he is a man to whom things don't come easily, but that he gains his own private pleasures from the hard graft that is painstakingly examining the world and his place in it.

NZ Herald, May 28, 2001

'Arts & Minds', Gilbert Wong

In the exceptional book The Art of Grahame Sydney (Longacre), which took the Montana award for non-fiction last year, the Dunedin poet Brian Turner put his finger on the essential quality embodied by the artist's work.

"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 remins, 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 has said that he has images stacked up in his head like a virtual CD rack. The drive to paint his spare landscapes and portaits of stillness is too strong to deny and will keep him painting for as long as he can. Which is good news for New Zealand art.

Otago Daily Times, May 14, 2001

'Sydney Wins Status as Poet of Pakeha Inheritance', Peter Entwistle

It's interesting to hear the Auckland Art Gallery is going to take Grahame Sydney's exhibition "On the Road", because it is a sign of a growing recognition of the artist's stature. The trouble is, though, it doesn't really go far enough.

Auckland could have had the big show staged at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, but didn't. It has now taken this excellent but more modest review, I think because it still hasn't quite got Sydney in perspective. The question is, what is so special about Sydney that Auckland - and the rest of New Zealand - ought to sit up and take notice of him?

His subjects are landscape - especially that of Central Otago - portraits and the nude. He works in various paint media, is a draughtsman and a printmaker. He has recently been described, apparently by Linda Tyler, one of the curators of "On the Road", as a "traditional realist", which is fair enough as a kind of shorthand, although it tends to obscure as much as it reveals.

The thing that distinguishes Grahame Sydney's art is that, among our living illusionists, he has most tellingly evoked the backward glance of the Pakeha. His is the rear-vision view of the European New Zealand mind. When Pakehas look back, this is how they see. Nor is his gaze mere sentimental nostalgia. Usually, it is the long, searching, glance of the feeling, inquiring mind. He has made himself the outstanding poet of the Pakeha inheritance.

It is no accident he has made such use of Central Otago. It is this landscape, more than any other in New Zealand, which bears the weathered and abandoned remains of long European occupation. It is here one most vividly sees the enduring, often futile, struggle of man against New Zealand nature.

It is the privilege of only a few artists to produce images of this stature. Grahame Sydney is one of them. Auckland would profit from a more extensive viewing of his work.

Otago Daily Times, May 14, 2001

'Auckland exhibition 'a coup' for Otago artist', Majorie Cook

Otago artist Grahame Sydney caught the public eye a long time ago. But until this year his popular Central Otago landscapes had never been exhibited in the Auckland City Gallery.

The exhibition works wer selected by Hocken Library curator Linda Tyler and assistant curator Claire Finlayson.

"Certainly it is a bit of a coup for a living artist to be shown there," Ms Tyler said, when contacted. It was unusual for the Auckland City Gallery to choose a traditional realist such as Sydney, she said.

THE PRESS, May 2, 2001

'Sydney Magic at Work', Mathew Appleby

Grahame Sydney drew large crowds to the opening of his new exhibition at CoCA, evidence of the almost ecstatically emotional response that continues to greet the Otago realist painter's work... Grahame Sydney, the 52 year-old Dunedin-born realist painter, is one of the most successful artists in New Zealand.

Hours before the show opened, the crowds were massed at the gallery's main doors. The opening was attended by 500 people, while last Thursday, 600 visitors passed through the gallery in four hours. Sydney's works, it seems, continue to attract an almost ecstatically emotional response.

When we talk about depicting the landscape we are talking every bit as much about depicting my inward responses as anything visual," he adds before returning to his beloved Otago skies and hills.

NZ HERALD, January 9, 2001

'In the Land of the Southern Man', Tony Wall

He's a Southern man, and he's southern bred, he's got the south in his blood, and he's gonna be here till he's damn well dead.

He don't drink Speight's but.

Grahame Sydney, who has made a name for himself painting Otago's sprawling vistas, prefers wine from one of the excellent vineyards in his province to the beer that sells itself as the pride of the south. In many ways the artist is the quintessential Southern Man, with his love of wide open spaces and scepticism about big North Island cities.

But Sydney does not like the Southern Man stereotype, made famous by the Speight's commercials. "He [Speight's Southern Man] is thick - the image is dumb. He's got none of the qualities I admire in a man."

We visited Sydney - whose book The Art of Grahame Sydney dominated the Montana Book Awards last year - at his Dunedin studio as we headed north on our road trip. He spoke glowingly of life in Otago, where the wine industry has exploded and farming is on the up.

'There's something funny going on here at the moment. There's a real resurgence of provincial pride. It's to do with a whole lot of things coming right and a feeling that things are better here than elsewhere.'

Sydney feels his heart is anchored firmly in the region, and the Central Otago area is his 'psychological landscape'. His oil paintings capture the arid severity of Central Otago with an almost photographic meticulousness.

'It's huge, spacious and open. It's the bare bones of a landscape; there's bugger all skin and no softness. It has an ancient feel to it, like it could be anywhere within the last half million years.' "

OTAGO DAILY TIMES December 16, 2000

Top painters talk about their favourite recipes By MARGIE THOMSON deputy books editor

The ease with which this book shepherds us between art and food accentuates that the two are clearly natural companions with more in common than you may at first have thought. Each must be ingested: food in a literal, physical way; art in a more cerebral way. Both must wend their way through one's senses: food is seen, smelled, tasted, masticated and fills up one's stomach. Art is experienced with the eye, then moves around in one's mind, permeating different levels of consciousness and understanding, touching one's emotions.

Each represents creative processes and individuality. Give two painters the same subject and two different interpretations will evolve. Give any two people the same ingredients, or even the same recipe, and two quite different meals will arrive on the table.

Here at home, in the interests of review, we chose a couple of recipes: Grahame Sydney's fish and chips and Chris Heaphy's licorice ice cream. When you're focused on process, interesting things happen. You find that you never follow the recipe exactly. We don't have an electric fryer, for instance, so guesswork and judgement were called for. We had no sambucca, so we used brandy. And so on.

And that's okay, because cooking, like art, is a matter of personal interpretation. The sensibility of the artist is what makes a painting. The sensitivity of the cook is what makes the meal.

By their food shall we know them.

CRAIG POTTON PUBLISHING, November 2000

The Food of Art, Keith Stewart

Grahame Sydney is a spectacular painter, making works which contain within their puny frames whole hillsides of muscular geology and human experience. He squeezes great skies into impossible spaces, so that clouds can race to the ionosphere without concern for the painted edge; he builds sheds which take root in bristling paddocks and offer weathered wood deep beyond their rusted doors. His paintings never hesitate before an impassable mountain range or nor'wester sky; instead, Sydney reduces them to manageable size, and our own imaginations blow them up to full size again, or even bigger.

Quiet and apparently silent these landscapes may be, but their expansive power and intemperate spirit is obvious in Sydney's paintings which distil their purely atavistic character into visions where humanity is not so much absent as totally insignificant. He presents us with a vision of the land that is both awe-inspiring and impervious to awe or any other human response to its spectacle... That Sydney is able to convey this often futile context is a remarkable achievement. That he can do so without moralising of diminishing the geographic splendour of his places is a wonder.

THE DOMINION, September 28, 2000

'Elevating the Ordinary', Josie McNaught

"The buildup doesn't bode well. In our sports-mad society, a gusty, grey day like the one Wellington turned on last Saturday afternoon is all the excuse you need to sit inside and watch the Olympics. There's also a Ranfurly Shield match unfolding about the time Grahame Sydney is to take a gallery tour of his exhibition at Porirua's Pataka art gallery.

So it's with amazement that the artist finds himself addressing more than 150 people who've made the journey to hear him talk about his touring exhibition, On the Road, and, as one woman puts it, 'touch the hand of the master'.

Though he's not that comfortable with the description 'realist', Sydney is realistic enough to be surprised and delighted by the turnout. He even tells his audience that he's been watching his fair share of the Olympics.

The turnout is testament to the approachability (dare one call it popularity?) of his art - and the man himself. He invites questions from the floor, and there are plenty, which he answers in a direct, no-nonsense way.

Afterwards he stays behind to meet and greet his adoring fans - there's no other way to describe the swell of almost breathless admiration that fills the gallery as he talks eloquently and honestly about his art.

Asked whether he considers his work to be beautiful, he says: 'Everyone has their own notion of what beauty is. I take something ordinary, and something that may otherwise have been ignored. I suppose you could say I'm elevating the ordinary'."

EVENING POST, September 21, 2000

'Down-to-earth Sydney riding high', Tom Cardy

"By any measure, things are going pretty well these days for Dunedin-based painter Grahame Sydney. His book, The Art of Grahame Sydney, won the top non-fiction prize at the Montana Book Awards last month. His paintings, of which he's best known for his landscapes of Central Otago, sell for more than $30,000 each. There's also a waiting list...

Nor does Sydney believe he's at his peak. 'I don't feel I've done my best by any means. And I'm looking forward to being a damn sight better than I am now, because I'll know more and I'll know more about me; what I want my pictures to be like, how I want them to represent me.'...

While popular with the public and some art critics, he's been dismissed by some critics and galleries because of his style and subject matter. Sydney says he's learnt to ignore criticism and praise.

'I am perfectly well aware that there are as many [people] who regard them [my paintings] as utterly insignificant and pointless in this day and age, as there are those who love them.

In the art world it is regarded with ridicule by a great many because it has nothing to do with internationalism or avant-garde work, or current political attitudes to what art should be doing. It's rather traditional and conventional, but I still believe in it. All I can say is that I have to do them because I can't help myself. This is what comes out of me because I'm like this.'

Sydney says he doesn't paint to be popular: 'If you start thinking about the audience or your supporters, you're a goner. You have to be able to ignore the market. I've always been lucky that I could ignore the market. I have always been able to find just enough people to support me. I have been allowed to be totally self-indulgent and someone has been able to help me out by supporting me. Sydney, however, does agree with curator Michael Findlay who wrote in The Art of Grahame Sydney that his work follows a tradition which began with realist painters Rata Lovell-Smith, Rita Angus, Bill Sutton and Christopher Perkins, who from the 1930s depicted the landscapes and people in New Zealand's regions. 'I'm exremely thrilled to be numbered among them,' he says.

There's also a couple of assumptions about being a realist painter which Sydney knocks on the head. For his landscapes, he doesn't drive out to a spot in Central Otago, set up canvas on an easel and start painting away. The paintings are done in his Dunedin studio, based on sketches he's made from his visits and, when short of time, the occasional photograph. The other big assumption is that Sydney's realist paintings are an exact copy of what can be seen at a location. In other words, if you had a copy of his painting you could drive to the spot, compare it to the painting and it would be exactly the same.

Far from it, says Sydney. 'I don't want the paintings to be thought of as examples of 'This is what I saw'. That would imply that in some way they are accurate, truthful or honest and they are not,' says Sydney. 'They are recreations and reconstructions based loosely on truths... What you try to do is find images which can do some justice to your own inward life. When we talk about depicting the landscape we are talking every bit as much depicting my inward responses as anything visual'."

THE LAKESIDER, September 2000, Vol 10 No. 9

'Dressed to illustrate philosophy'

Otago painter Grahame Sydney opened the Wanaka Arts Centre wearing conventional dark jacket, tie and what he called his "grubby jeans." He told the audience his half-and-half dress illustrated his advice to all artists - respect tradition, but don't take any notice of what people say about your work.

Mr Sydney said artists must pay attention to traditional art forms of the past, but they must also develop a "phenomenal arrogance" which ignored the opinions of others. There were too many imitators in the art world. Artists had the fascinating and difficult task of acknowledging and maintaining their uniqueness. It was vital to "leave the house and go to work." He rated an outside studio as a necessity and said he liked to lock himself away while painting, and make as much mess as he liked.

Mr Sydney said he preferred to paint from pencil sketches. He recalled how once working outdoors he was embarrassed by the attention of a watcher. After a long silence, the man sidled up, looked at the easel and commented: "So you're a bit of a painter, eh?"

"And that's what I am," Mr Sydney said, " a bit of a painter."

SUNDAY STAR TIMES, September 3, 2000

'On the road', Helen Watson White

Finding time to paint has become Grahame Sydney's greatest challenge. When I first tried to reach him, his cellphone was off while he addressed a conference of the New Zealand Institute of Professional Photographers. The previous weekend Sydney was opening a show by realist painter Simon Richardson at Dunedin's Marshall Seifert gallery and before that he was in Auckland to receive three prizes for The Art of Grahame Sydney at the Montana Book Awards.

Does he ever, I asked, get time to paint any more? 'It's a problem,' says Sydney, referring both to the rampant publicity and the displacement of what mission-statement writers call the 'primary business' which brought him that fame.

'Painters have to paint,' he says. 'It's as simple as that. I don't enjoy being in the limelight - it doesn't suit me.'...

This show, importantly, removes Sydney's product from the commercial circus; none of the 35 paintings, many of which feature in his award-winning book, are for sale. Other qualities are given a chance to speak, affirming that he has more going for him than his saleability... The localness of the images, however, is not really the issue. While Mt Pisa, Kokonga, Weddeburn and Gimmerburn might be names to conjure images with Otago lovers, the wooden shed-colour in the Hocken's Railway Red is standard in both hemispheres.

For that matter the blood - or rusted-red colour - combined with grass-gold and a lavendar-blue sky, recall, to any who have met them, the hues of Italian altar-pieces painted 600 years ago by Sydney's exemplars."

LISTENER, August 19, 2000

'Power of two', Denis Welch

"It never pays to be too confident in these matters - Montana judges have a way of raising literary eyebrows with their choices - but probably no one was too surprised that the major non-fiction award went to The Art of Grahame Sydney, the magnificent book from Dunedin's Longacre Press...

Sydney had to make three trips to the microphone, in fact, because his book also won its specific category (illustrative arts) and the Reader's Choice Award as the result of all those coupons sent in by you folk out there in book-loving land.

'It was very embarrassing to me, I must say,' says Sydney, who was accompanied by Longacre managing editor Barbara Larsen when he took the stage for the third time. 'I'm just the public front for what was a very co-operative venture. The determination to go ahead was very much Barbara's; then the whole shape and feel of the published book was very much down to Jenny Cooper, the designer; and every decision had to be backed up by the management. I got very lucky on this, that Barbara and partners decided to go with it.'

To hear Sydney talk, you'd think his paintings were the least part of the book; but he persistently attributes its success to the stunning production quality."

HERALD, August 8, 2000

'Bookmarks', Peter Sinclair

"MOST MOVING: The Art of Grahame Sydney

Dominating the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2000 last week (Montana Medal, Readers' Choice Award, Illustrative Arts category), Sydney's vacant, desolate Otago landscapes have now been hung in cyberspace. Already owned by collectors like Nelson Mandela, Elton John and Sam Neill, you too can appreciate the works of a New Zealand Wyeth at this new website."

THE PRESS, August 5, 2000

'Written in friendship', Diana McCurdy and Cate Brett

"OWEN MARSHALL ON GRAHAME SYDNEY

Do awards matter to Grahame?

I think awards do matter to Grahame. Public recognition reinforces your sense of confidence in your craft. Having said that, not getting an award wouldn't stop Grahame from doing exactly what he wanted to do because he's a very focused, self-sufficient artist.

What aspect of winning a Montana will bring Grahame greatest satisfaction?

He is a very generous person and even in the short time since the award was announced, I know a lot of his enjoyment has been in seeing the talents of others recognised through his book: Longacre, Jenny Cooper, and the people who contributed the articles - Brian Turner (poet), Reg Graham (photographer), my daughter Belinda Jones (art curator). His enormous satisfaction in their shared recognition is typical of Grahame.

Is it ironical that the accolades for Grahame have come from the book world rather than the art world?

Maybe. I'm not sufficiently into the art world to know how they regard him. I presume he is seen as a very large figure in traditional landscape painting. But certainly Timeless Land and now this book have brought him a whole public outside the art world. Having said that, his recent exhibition at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery was extremely well received by art commentators. This sense of Grahame being an isolated regionalist and not being mentioned by Auckland magazines, I think he is past that. He is too big to ignore now.

What do you admire most in Grahame?

I admire his single-mindedness and his generosity. I admire his dedication to his art, which at times can come across almost as a selfish arrogance, and I say that as a close friend. Grahame will do it his way: he is not particularly interested in other people's opinions of his work."

NZ HERALD, August 3, 2000

'They breed 'em arty down south', Michele Hewitson

"In the same way, Sydney travels to the remote reaches of Central Otago to collect images few other people see. Proud of the fact that he is a 'South Islander and Otago person,' he believes that, 'although anchored in my own province and family connections, it doesn't mean that the work is only appreciated there.'

'Good work from the corner of anyone's country is of interest to people anywhere. New Zealanders have paintings of old Dutch masterpieces on their walls. Not because they have any Dutch genealogy - they love it because it's beautiful and speaks to them in mysterious ways. I like to think that's what I might do some of the time.'

Like Sydney's paintings, which transfer bone-chilling winds to warm living rooms, Marshall's tales transcend the regionalism of their provenance to become universal stories."

NZ HERALD, August 3, 2000

'The right words and the right images - how they see each other'

"Owen Marshall on the work of Grahame Sydney. 'One of the things that I sometimes think is that they're paintings which are entirely unromanticised but seem to me to be done with a sense of awe - almost reverence. It does seem to me that his paintings have authentic emotion contained by an almost perfect mastery of technique, I think that's what almost traps initial viewers. They're so fascinated by the technical perfection. I think sometimes Grahame gets a little bit cross at 'ooh, look how that log just looks like a log.' It seems to me that the essentials of landscape are seen with the heart. There's a lot of feeling in his work, but it's not up front, it's not indulgent, it's not demanding of emotion - but there's a lot of emotional tension there in the paintings."

THE PRESS, August 2, 2000

'Friends win premier book awards', Diana McCurdy

"For author Owen Marshall and artist Grahame Sydney, the pleasure of winning the two premier awards at the 2000 Montana Book Awards is doubly sweet. The premier award winners have been friends for years, and have seen their work featured in each others' publications on more than one occasion.

Last night in Christchurch, they were respectively presented with the Deutz Medal for fiction and the Montana Medal for non-fiction.

Sydney, who also won the illustrative arts award and the readers' choice award, said he was overwhelmed by their double success. 'We have done a lot together and it's a great pleasure for me to have Owen as a mate,' he said.

Sydney said he was overwhelmed by his success. 'I thought it was great to be short-listed and I really had no expectations beyond that. I didn't think that a book made in Dunedin by a South Islander would win'."

THE PRESS, Thursday, June 29, 2000

'Sited, Art'

Works by Grahame Sydney hang in the homes of the rich and his paintings are now sold to a private waiting list. The New Zealander paints real New Zealand - big pictures of big country. He has just released a book of his work and says he has 'images stacked up like a sort of CD rack in my head, and I'm not getting the time to do them'."

SUNDAY STAR TIMES, June 25, 2000

'Reviews, The Art of Grahame Sydney', Helen Watson White

"With the publication of this magnificent book, a finalist in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, Longacre has brought Sydney to an audience throughout New Zealand and beyond. Not for the first time, however; they approached this achievement in 1995 with the full-colour reproduction of over 50 major paintings in Timeless Land. The new book, impatiently awaited in the absence of any sort of catalogue for Regions of the Heart, is likely to enjoy the same sellout success on the strength of it 144 plates alone.

This is emphatically not a book about Sydney illustrated by reference to his work, but (as far as possible) a book of his art set off by bits of questioning/supportive prose.

The problem is that plates are not "the art" itself but photo reductions of it. To appreciate Sydney's talent as a realist artist, you need to understand the ways in which his paintings, etchings and lithographs are different from photography. Those differences can't be conveyed through a series of photographs. You need to see the works themselves. Still, this book is the next best thing."

NORTH & SOUTH, May, 2000

Artists give insight into role of psyche in their work, 12 June 2000 By Simon Hartley

Three prominent South Island artists gave the first of five lectures at the Third New Zealand Conference on the Arts and Psyche at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery on Saturday. Painter Grahame Sydney, writer Owen Marshall and poet Brian Turner offered an audience of more than 100 people sobering, at times personal and reflective, insights into the psyche's effect on their respective works. Sydney explored the realism of art styles and reality. As a painter, he had to be as persuasive as possible when "painting lies", as opposed to a camera image's reality. "What painting tells the world the most about you? Few artists are able to chose one which does this. "By painting the past, paintings contain part of me." At the lecture, the artist unveiled an unfinished painting that had been returned to him, after lying in a pile of rub- bish at a former residence for several decades. It was from a period when he had rejected the advances of a former lover. "I look for things which move me most to paint," Sydney said.

NORTH & SOUTH, May, 2000

'In Review, The Best of Books & Music', Michael King

"The notion he is not to be taken seriously as an artist because of the so-called realism of his drawings, portraits, landscape paintings and lithographs is one I reject outright. Sydney's work has always been about more than realism: it evokes character and mood in a manner that is highly accomplished and, in New Zealand, wholly original. Art critic Peter Simpson perhaps gets closest to identifying the magic of Sydney's work when he speaks of 'realism and abstraction subtly nudging each other.'

Sydney's genius derives from his capacity for selection of perspective and detail, composition, and control of light and colour. And the fact that such coherent juxtapositions add up to genius is clear in a marvellously produced book, The Art of Grahame Sydney, Longacre Press... In addition to being a worthy record of the man and his art, this book must also be a leading contender for the Montana book production award."

Exhibition a Success, 19 February 2000

By Mark Hotton

"The Grahame Sydney Regions of the Heart exhibition, which ends at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery on Sunday, was a big hit with visitors, gallery director Priscilla Pitts said. Since the exhibition opened in late November, 28,742 people had visited the gallery, including 5063 visitors from out of town. This compared with 22,629 local residents and 3935 visitors for the corresponding period last year, she said. "We always knew Regions of the Heart would strike a chord with visitors, especially those who love the Otago region," Ms Pitts said.

ART NEWS NEW ZEALAND, Winter 2000

'The Art of Grahame Sydney, by Grahame Sydney and contributors, Longacre Press', Dan Chappell

"The texts are well-positioned throughout, ensuring the book is no mere coffee table tome, and serve to create a more reflective wasy to visit the works. The reproduction throughout is excellent, as befits the artist's precise style and brush technique. The long winter shadows, big skies and wind-battered plains almost come off the page and the all-pervading loneliness and solitude so prevalent in his work is well captured."

ART NEW ZEALAND, Number 95/Winter 2000

'The Surrealist Impulse', Alex Witherow

"His scrupulous naturalism only serves to place the strange and impossible components within a persuasive grounding. Viewpoints in many of his pictures are ambiguous and disorientating as are distances and proportions. There are sudden jumps from near to far, foreground to background, and an emphasis on the sometimes eerie discordances and tensions between forms which do not quite balance or connect, the variance between things which should be the same and the similarities between things which should be different...

Sydney's self-proclaimed definition of an artwork's best qualities comes to mind in a new light; 'its capacity to allow us to glimpse what it must be like being someone else, and to plant lingering images in our minds, images which must mean something because we can't forget them....

It is insufficient to consider Sydney's works merely in terms of regionalism. Aspects, not just of Surrealism, but Romanticism and many other strains, inform his work, all adding to a far more universal statement than is typically recognised. What is being dealt with is far more 'regions of the mind' than 'regions of the heart'."

ART NEW ZEALAND, Number 95/Winter 2000

'Sydney's Calm', David Eggleton

"Sydney paints stillness ('I'm the long stare, not the quick glimpse.') He doesn't paint rain or turbulence; he paints fine, calm days or night silence. But there's always a tension in his images, a hint of undercurrents. He gives his naturalistic settings the theatrical intensity of surrealist dreamscapes. And in his paintings, simple details are magnified into monumentality... The primitive vernacular buildings he depicts are made from simple timber frames sheathed in plain corrugated iron. These static structures seem to represent the enigma of existence...

In Sydney, the landscape is lifted up and out of itself, and made to stand for the transience of Time. The rural totems: the mailbox, or the railway, or the road, or the fence, are loving, indeed devotional, reconstructions... Sydney's studies of the female nude are part of his search for the essential form of things, part of his argument about the way things are: unadorned, taut, muscular forms in which he seeks to capture the fleeting moment - the exact point at which a garment being removed starts to pull away from the head, for example."

LISTENER, May 6, 2000

'Admiring the View', Kevin Ireland

"Sydney is our most genuinely 'local' artist, in the single sense that the subjects of his portraits, nudes and landscapes are the people and places he lives among, in Dunedin and Central Otago. Yet in no way is his vision blinkered or provincial. His technical methods and skills belong to a tradition that derives directly from the discoveries and refinements of the great studios of the Renaissance, and many of his finest paintings aim ambitiously at 'universal' questions or statements.

Sydney, more than any other contemporary New Zealand painter I can think of imposes attitudes that I believe derive directly from meditation and poetic perception. Though his realism employs a breathtaking range of formal techniques, it has outgrown conscious adherence to a set of academic precepts and instead obeys the 'literal' requirements of a personal response to particular places and occasions. His paintings are full of mood, association and speculation; they are brilliant and allusive commentaries on life. This book offers a wonderful introduction to them."

OTAGO DAILY TIMES, April 1, 2000

'Art book challenges on many levels', Bryan James, Associate Editor

"Others will simply find in The Art of Grahame Sydney a jolly good read, for it contains some lively writing about art in New Zealand, a subject too often fraught with cultural cringe and much wrong-headed dispute. The artist, himself no mean essayist, provides a thoughtful account of his early years and the influences that sparked his career. In an interview with an old friend and teacher, Reg Graham, Sydney supplies further quite revealing information about the creative process."

METRO, April 2000

'Sydneysider', Tim Wilson

"One of the heroes of regionalism, painter Grahame Sydney's work is so sought after that prospective buyers must install themselves on a private waiting list and wait at the master's whim. It is a wise move then of Longacre Press to produce The Art of Grahame Sydney. This book validates the $99.95 price tag. The reproductions are excellent, the accompanying essays informative (my favourite is Brian Turner's)."

THE PRESS, Christchurch, March 18, 2000

'My dreamtime vision', Christopher Moore

"The accolades accompanying his work - 1978 Hodgkins Fellow, an acclaimed major exhibition at Dunedin's Public Art Gallery in late 1999, a Hocken Library touring exhibition later this year, a successful book The Timeless Land - have now been followed by a second book, part biography, part catalogue, to be released next week.

From the South Island's deep heart, he continues to translate the sibilant whisper of an autumn wind, the endless rumpled fanfare of Otago hills, and the ephemeral reminders of man's presence into paint and canvas. In an era consumed by noisy babble, Sydney, the Southern Man, has forged his position as a consummate painter of luminous silences."

SUNDAY STAR TIMES, Keith Stewart

"Sydney is a clever magician who plies his craft with great skill and subtlety, making paintings that are seemingly simple, but their plain reality tenders deeper emotions than simple recognition. You don't just see the land here, you feel it...

These hills, these skies give us a voice that is unique, a voice that is evoked by the art of Grahame Sydney. It is the voice of us all."

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