Thursday 3 October – Sunday 27 October 2024
“For me, once a painter, always a painter”
Kareen Anchen, Gallery Director, Cascade Art Gallery
Like many painters, Chris has had to find her own way and has spent a lifetime doing so; we are much 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 sight 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 alla-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 was 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 1980s. 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; there were only two women on the RMIT academic art staff. Those art student days were intense, swashbuckling 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.
See all the pictures in the issue.
This article appeared in the Tarrangower Times, 11 October 2024.
