Celia Morgan was born in New Zealand and has spent most of her adult life here in Australia. 

Craig Waddell’s paintings have become as readily identifiable as all great painters would wish to be, and his work is in increasingly high demand. With characteristically thick application of oil paint, his florals seem to emanate from the canvas organically - as if the artist were merely the facilitator. I have found that this is what the viewer responds to most - the artist’s ability to engulf the viewer in an experience of flora that transcends the physical.

Similarly, the viewer almost expects his roosters to cock-a-doodle-doo! Each bird is imbued with such strength of character, such individuality, that they can actually be quite imposing. What a fabulous subject matter! I am a huge fan and have so enjoyed helping clients to purchase Waddell and to see the transformation of living rooms and office spaces alike.

Craig was born in Sydney in 1973. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art from the National Art School in 1999 and a MFA (Printmaking) at the Chiang Mai University, Thailand 2004.

His recent awards include: the 2008 Moya Dyring, Art Gallery of NSW Residency at the Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris; The 2007 Marten Bequest Traveling Art Scholarship; and the 2007 Gunnery studio, Artspace Sydney.

He won the Mosman Art Prize in 2010; the previous year he won the Mosman Art Prize Peoples Choice award and was highly commended. He was awarded the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize in 2005 and the 2005 Tattersall’s Art Prize for landscape painting. He was also winner of the Paddington Art Prize and the Norville Australian Landscape Prize, both in 2004.

Waddell has been a finalist in the Sulman Prize in 2010, Dobell Drawing Prize in 2007 and 2004, the 2007 Glover Prize for Landscape Painting of Tasmania, the 2006 Archibald Prize, the 2006 Kilgour Prize and the ABN AMRO 2006 Emerging Art Award. He was also included in the Salon Des Refuse 2006 exhibition.

In 2005 he was a finalist in the Wynne Prize, and in the 2005 Blake Prize for Religious Art. Waddell was highly commended for the Brett Whiteley Traveling Scholarship in 2003, 2001 and 1999 and the Lloyd Rees Memorial Award 2000. He was the recipient of the Waverley Painting Prize 1999 and the Pat Corrigan Traveling Scholarship in 1998.

Waddell has completed residencies in Paris, Thailand, Vietnam and Sydney and has participated in many group shows.

I am very proud to be representing New Zealand artist Kate MacKenzie in Australia. For enquiries about available works, please feel free to email me on henrietta@henrietta.co.

Kate likes to explore the fine line between reality and surrealism, with subtle reference to political and social issues. She says, “As an artist, it is a true privilege to have a voice in my community”.

She gained success early into her career, becoming a finalist with three works in the National Telecom Art Awards in 2000 and 2001, and in 2002 was chosen as Feature Artist for the Hawkes Bay Vintners Charity Wine Auction. That same year she was commissioned to paint a collection of work to be hung in the reception area of the James Cook Hotel Grand Chancellor in Wellington, and subsequent public art commissions have followed, including the Hawkes Bay Opera House.
 
 In recent years, Kate’s work has been selected for Hawkes Bay Review and EAST Exhibition. Today she continues to develop her work in the fine arts and enjoys creating garments each year for the International World of Wearable Arts in Wellington.

Kate is from Hawkes Bay, New Zealand and has been painting since 1999. Her work is held in private collections throughout New Zealand, Europe, Australia and America.

I first came across Hilary Herrmann’s work about ten years ago in Byron Bay where she lives and frequently exhibits. She has been staging solo exhibitions on the north coast for more than ten years and has participated in group exhibitions as far north as Brisbane and as far south as Melbourne, taking in Sydney on the way through!

A finalist in the Portia Geach Prize, the Blake Prize and the Lismore Regional Gallery Portrait Prize to name a few, Hilary has also won prizes in other regional exhibitions and awards, and most recently, her painting came first in the Coraki Art Show.

Hilary’s work is in the first instance ethereal, but there is a tension always between what is happening on the canvas and what is suggested off it. Her subjects often appear as though they are characters on an other worldly, unknowable stage that we as viewers, can only guess at.

It is riveting and mystical, and compels us to follow into our own imaginations to find the source of her fantastical narrative.

John Baird is a Melbourne artist who must have spent some considerable time observing and understanding Sydney Harbour because he captures it so magnificently! With a bold, flattened aesthetic, his scenes are at once familiar and real, but also border on the surreal in his conflation of the foreground and background. The image becomes ethereal, dreamlike, yet nostalgic.

Baird’s still lifes are equally imbued with nostalgia, as he reinterprets material remnants of sourced vintage wallpapers, fabric and flocking to reference connection with bygone eras. He says this reimagining of the old acts as ‘a coded diary lurking behind each work’, eliciting in the viewer a ‘knowing’ deep within ourselves of the landscape of his narrative.

I first bought a Baird still life years ago and have so enjoyed seeing it every day. There is a timelessness about his work that is deeply comforting - a connection to all that is earthly and stable, and yet it challenges convention by flattening the image and refiguring the picture plane to take us on a journey to a whole other place.

Love, love, love it.