Maysey Craddock Studio

Sometimes a piece takes me on a wild ride in the studio. I start with what I think is a pretty straightforward and doable plan, and I happily lose myself in the intricacies of a branch or the negative shapes of sky. But somewhere along the way I step back and realize I may have made progress in putting paint on a surface, but what I have really done is to formulate a very complex calculus that will now take many many hours and days to resolve and that I’ll be doing flips in my head trying to imagine my way out of, or through, a color and balance conundrum.

This happened with Cloud Azalea. The drawing was new. It was compelling. I spent almost half a year translating it from a photograph to a line drawing, and ambitiously just scaled it big from the get go. On the wall, I allowed myself to get lost in the painting before I realized that the drawing was also a trap (especially on the bottom half). Layers and layers and layers ensued. It became a piece that maybe I could have called done about halfway through, but instead I opted to push hard and pull it through some kind of portal to emerge on the other side as a piece I could never have imagined or planned.

I don’t paint in big strokes, but I dedicate a lot of time to physical engagement with a piece. I am not sure if I can say it this way, but I think that if there was a time lapse of how a piece like this is built and unbuilt, a sense of gesture would be visible. Maybe this gesture, this instinctual arc of commitment, is the thing that fully realizes the work. I had a hard time calling it on this one but fortunately a couple of very close friends were there at the end to witness, helping to pull me out of myopic aesthetic handwringing and set this one free. Thankyou & !! I learned a lot, and I know that another mad math equation of a piece will come again, and the wild ride will pull me right back in.

This and six other new works are on view in Larkspur, California through January 6 in my show “A land apart, a world within”

Shown here:
“Cloud Azalea”; 2023; 48 x 62 inches; gouache, flashe and thread on found paper

Along the bays and estuaries of the northern Gulf Coast, large swathes of pristine wilderness are, thankfully, continuing their natural cycles in the form of protected wilderness and conservation easements. But in some places, development is spreading like a w**d. Along Perdido Bay on the border of Alabama and Florida, most of the winding (and eroding) coastline is hemmed in and provisionally held together by low walls and ramparts of imported stone. But here and there a vision of the natural way of things can be found. Wind and waves constantly shape and shift the sands, and the pines and live oaks that cluster in thickets of palmetto are submerged and then released by the tides. The ebb and flow is endless, and I imagine myself sitting in the moonlight arbor of this tree, seeing only the arc of the night sky and the darkness that once was.

While I was working on this painting, I revisited the audiobook “Horizon”, a gorgeously expansive memoir by the late Barry Lopez. His evocations of geological time, his empathy for the natural world and his embrace of other ways of knowing are embedded in the nocturne layers of this piece. As an artist, I struggle with how to reflect the tensions I see in how we shape the natural world. I discover and revisit these sites with my camera, documenting their senescence, regeneration and, in some cases, their vanishing. In the end, I seem to always come back to beauty, and it is through beauty that I hope to elicit new connections to the natural world and, as Barry Lopez brings forth in his writing, our place in it.

“a world is blue with night”; 2023; 49x38.5 inches; gouache, flashe and thread on found paper
On view in my show “A land apart, a world within” until January 6, 2024.

I’ll be having a live instagram conversation today at 12:30 Memphis time with - talking about making, process, color and “imaginative populations in water”, as seen here in “anemone sea” 🌝

Posted • We’re in the middle of summer, and all we can think about is cooling off by a river, taking in bird’s chirping and water lapping against the bank. Throughout her career, Maysey Craddock has watched interactions between light and shadow, reflection and refraction, and ever-evolving habitats. Her titles capture the unnamable in-between times of day, imaginative populations in water, and abstracted dream spaces that surround us in nature.

Beginning with photographic study, Craddock documents the in-between spaces and transient moments in nature, specifically the Alabama coastlines’ active ruin and reinvention. Though conceptually concerned with humankind’s destruction of the shore, Craddock’s formal interest lies in abstraction. In recent years, she has explored video work with friend Kyle Statham to add dimensionality to her practice and inform new considerations for her works on paper.

✨Today is the last day to see ‘Golden Hour’ ✨

Thank you to everyone at the gallery for shining a light on this work! 💛🙏💛