 | Callum Arnold challenges the traditional representation of the landscape as static. His paintings are “reminiscent of a Sunday journey. …Long drives through the landscape are experienced in passing through the car window.” (1)
“Despite the sense of journeying, nothing is blurred. On the contrary, an Arnold painting exudes a sense of tranquility, of time stilled, a dream frozen.” (2)
“My interest lies in the disjointed construction that memory creates through the influence of fleeting visions of land. The attempt is to depict a more universal view rather than a regional specific location. Some aspects or similarities between locations are due to geographical feature of the rural environment and the way roads are constructed to dissect the land into portions.” (3)
“The act of looking for dramatic panoramic landscapes in dislocated spaces is limited to viewing from roads and the visual memory. My work is primarily concerned with geographic experience and the transpositions of media upon that knowledge. The act of painting the visual…is no longer an accurate rendering of the actual world but a collaboration of processes. The inherent spiritual nature of the land has become diffused creating a new visual history.” (4)
“The great journey in New Zealand painting has been by road, from John Kinder to Colin McCahon….Arnold proves that the road trip as a nationalist narrative isn’t over yet. His paintings put us in the front seat of a vehicle driving through the heartland on a road that, paradoxically, seems to be taking us both back to Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and forward to a future of destabilised digital representations.” (5)
Born Wellington in 1973, Callum Arnold gained a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours, 2000 and a Masters of Fine Arts with Distinction in Printmaking 2001 from the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts.
(1) Callum Arnold, Artist Statement, 2005
(2) Warwick Brown, ‘Seen this Century’, Godwit, 2009
(3) Callum Arnold, Artist Statement, 2005
(4) Ibid
(5) David Eggleton, ‘High Visibility’, NZ Listener, April, 2006
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