Crisis What Crisis

Acrylic on acrylic

1000mm x 1000mm

2020

Candy Clarke has been painting for continuously since graduating from art school in 1983 where she majored in graphics.

Her style is post-modern pop/abstract expressionism inspired by New Zealand artists like Dick Frizzel, Colin McCahon, Toss Woolaston, Peter Robinson, Richard Parker and Scott McFarlane and by the colours of the Fauves and German expressionists and the colour and style of Gauguin.

Candy paints her works in acrylic on acrylic, using everything from sheets of Perspex to moulded shapes and small blocks to more conventionally framed sheets. Because Candy paints on the back of the perspex you look through the sheet to the image. This means she is painting backwards to build up the layers of paint in the reverse order – for example, cloud first then sky etc. This makes any editing of the piece a lot trickier as you can’t just paint over to make changes, but you need to carefully scrape through the dry layers and then blend the paint in again.