Daisy Craddock: In Season

September 10 - October 4, 2022
  • Daisy Craddock, In Season

    Daisy Craddock

    In Season

    The idea for this show began last fall at the height of apple picking season. Here in the Hudson Valley we are surrounded by small farms growing heirloom fruits and vegetables. My favorite roadside farmstands had seemingly endless displays of the local apple varieties. I brought home a basketful and began studying them one by one. I researched their histories and of course taste tested as I visually explored my harvest, posting the final results on Instagram. Here are just a few fruits of this ongoing project which began last September and ended with the “keeper” apples, which stored well into late March. 

     

  • Apple Diptychs

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  • The second group of works stems from an extraordinary experience I had In June this year. I was invited to...

    The second group of works stems from an extraordinary experience I had In June this year.  I was invited to join a group of mostly younger artists for a residency in Umbria, organized by artist/curator Michelle Grabner and hosted by Icarts. It was my first artist residency since the late 1980’s! I had imagined sampling the sights and flavors of big open air markets but our 12C hill town, Monte Castello di Vibio, grew nothing. Nonetheless, our  produce was  gathered once a week from the valley below, and I was able to have my pick of the deliveries. My  almost three week stay in Italy was remarkably productive. 

     

     

  • ITALIAN DIPTYCHS

  • Our small group of artists was called “Nido” or “Nest” in Italian, and we exhibited our work on the grounds of a 12C stone church at the end of the residency. No doubt inspired by the Giottos, Caravaggios and Raphaels I’d just seen in Rome and then Assisi, my installation took on a spiritual aspect, as I attached the diptychs, unframed, onto the plaster and whitewashed walls of an arched niche inside the church. I’ve often thought of the diptychs as meditations. Unframed and fragile, they began to feel like prayers in this sacred space. It was a fitting metaphor as we suffered from the effects of global warming throughout Europe and the rest of the world this summer.
  • Upon reading this artist statement, my brilliant partner, himself a writer and educator, the artist Stephen Westfall, suggested ending with...

    Upon reading this artist statement, my brilliant partner, himself a writer and educator, the artist Stephen Westfall, suggested ending with this quote from The White Bird by John Berger…


    The notion that art is a mirror of nature is one that appeals only in periods of skepticism. Art does not imitate nature, it imitates a creation, sometimes to propose an alternative world, sometimes to amplify, to confirm, to make social the brief hope offered by nature. Art is an organized response to what nature allows us to glimpse occasionally. Art sets out to transform the potential recognition into an unceasing one. It proclaims ‘man’ (all peoples) in the hope of receiving a surer reply… the transcendental face of art is always a form of prayer.