CHRIS DELPRATT - ‘Roadside Impressions’ exhibition survey (2003 -2015)
Chris Delpratt
Boundary the Other Side, 2007
Oil on Cotton Canvas
92 x 111.5 cm
Chris Delpratt
‘Roadside Impressions’ exhibition survey (2003 -2015)
Thursday 3 October – Sunday 27 October 2024
To be officially opened by David Harley, Contemporary Visual Artist on Saturday 5 October 2-5pm.
“For me once a painter, always a painter”
Like many painters, Chris has had to find her own way and has spent a lifetime doing so, we are much the richer for her endeavour.
Roadside Impressions is an immersive survey exhibition from 2003 – 2015. On exhibition are meditative landscape paintings by Chris Delpratt. Harmonious oil on canvas paintings which appear like gentle liquid watercolours works rather than oils. Delpratt has invented a unique way of painting en plein air. Her evocative paintbrush technique is washy, deft and consistent. Very painterly works which whisper, rather than scream from the gallery walls.
Chris has returned to the same places and painted hundreds of impressions, backroads, fields, paddocks, gullies and tracks looking toward the undulating foothills of the Dandenong Ranges in Melbourne’s east. ‘Green Corridor’, ‘Boundary the Other Side’ and ‘Everchanging’ are not only evocative incantations of the pastoral world of landscape in painting, but these artworks are also subjective evidence of the Melbourne urban periphery. Albeit as art paintings, not photographs, we witness the documentation of the suburban food bowl, butted up to the necessary fields farmed for strawberries and the like. We site rows of trees on the horizon, wind breaks and creek gullies. As observed in ‘September Haze’, ‘Rain’, ‘Smoke Haze’, ‘Chilled Through’ the painter has been in the moment and at one with weather elements.
Observation is key to these complex worlds. Paintings woven together with the rigorous discipline and intuition of a textile designer, conducting the warp and weft of pattern to make something beautiful and pleasing to the eye, the touch and senses.
“Her easy expertise with the brush and with paint that is whisper thin, results in an image in which we can almost feel the damp air caressing our skin. By including only what detail she needed to, we sense the paintings fragmentary nature; its breath and its pulse.” Simon Gregg - Director/Curator Gippsland Art Gallery
“I guess my work still contains that awareness of abstraction.”
Chris has spent a lifetime learning about space. Close up space not distant space. She is cogniscient of abstract painting and sites as influences Abstract Expressionist painters, William De Kooning, Mark Rothko and then later discovering Richard Diebenkorn’s painting. All interested in gesture, the vibration of colour and the deep understanding of what it means to work with space, no simple matter.
Chris Delpratt’s paintings are remarkably consistent, enduring yet fragile and melancholic moments framed on canvas, which speak more to the Golden age lost and Virgil’s pastoral poetry than illustration of a depicted scene. ‘Winter Greys’, ‘Soft Winds’ and ‘Golden Glow’ are magnificent, understated experiences of what it must feel like to be in this painter’s shoes whilst communing with nature. Painted in one sitting and on location en plein air these a-la-prima works reflect a feeling of being fully present in the eternal now. The moment may pass, the impression disappears forever, yet the paintings endure as a human record in time and one’s memory.
Chris Delpratt has devised an approach to oil painting utilising a medium of pure linseed oil. Through transparent layers of colour, light passes and is reflected from the white of the canvas beneath with the resulting effect rather akin to the luminosity of watercolour on paper.
Delpratt has invested her canvases with a meditative quality. In depicting the moods of this place, she has found the perfect vehicle from which patterns of order and harmony can be transposed and fixed in time.” Damian Smith – Curator/Arts Writer
Chris trained as a graphic artist in Queensland quickly realising it was not going to be enough to sustain her curiosity and painter’s spirit. Chris attended Summer schools at the Darling Downs Institute where she met like-minded artists. She met Sydney painters Suzanne Archer, David Aspen and introduced to the works of Guy Warren, Elisabeth Cummings, Ann Thomson, John Peart who all had a genuine impact on her painter’s life.
Chris migrated to Melbourne and enrolled at RMIT to study a Bachelor of Arts, Fine Art – Painting. Abstract Expressionism was de rigueur in Melbourne painting colleges in the early 1980’s. It was a time when the pervasive male gaze was starting to be challenged. Despite worldly artistic influences permeating the Melbourne bubble, the times were still conservative, and women artists did not fare so well against their male contemporaries-only two women on the RMIT academic art staff. Those art student days were intense, swash buckling and heady and to stay true to vocation required enormous nerve. Chris Delpratt clearly had the goods and pushed on with her singular vision and deeply enquiring mind.
Not surprisingly, Chris might have become a professional pianist but instead made a conscious decision to choose painting over a career in music. Music is still clearly part of her process. When we look at a Chris Delpratt painting ‘yes’ there is subject, a landscape, but there is so much more. What is It? It is a musical form of lyrical abstraction. One must take time to see and to feel and to look; her paintings are a type of meditation. Spending time in a room with her paintings requires time, not only to ‘get your eye in’ but to tune in to the artists unique visual language. Recently, at the 2023 Maldon Landscape Prize at Edge Galleries, judge and esteemed Australian painter, Mary Tonkin gave honourable mention to Chris Delpratt’s entry ‘Enriched’.
“For the haptic way I see with this painting; the feeling that each form has been palpated by the eye and for its glowing, writhing, thoroughly embodied sense of being present.”
Chris has been a finalist in many a significant Australian art prize with her paintings, including twice in the John Leslie painting prize, Gippsland; the Fleurieu Landscape prize in South Australia; the Paddington prize, Sydney; the Heysen, the Muswellbrook, the Flanagan to name a few. Chris Delpratt has had several solo exhibitions in Melbourne and Brisbane.
Kareen Anchen – Gallery Director
Cascade Art Gallery, 2024
David Harley
Contemporary Visual Artist
David makes work concerned with what he calls ‘free form abstract painting’ using both traditional, and since the mid 1990s digital tools, folding in the use of technologies into the practice to see where it can take this form of abstraction. This is often manifested as the moving image as well as installation and easel painting and in artwork commissions for buildings. He did his undergrad at RMIT and also went onto do a Master of Fine Art at RMIT in 1995 and later a Practice-led PhD at the VCA graduating in 2015. Between 2004 and 2013, he periodically worked and exhibited in Germany. Since 1995 he has also worked as a casual lecturer including at RMIT, VCA, Monash and Victoria University. He is represented by Charles Nodrum Gallery in Melbourne.