Dr David Craig


Craig describes his Oamaru / Waitaki paintings which are framed in recycled native timbers as “trace lines across abstracted forms and assembled fields of colour and sensibility.  Drawing on photographic, recalled and historical observations of local and southern landscape and its patternings, inscriptions, big active skies...  They are decorous and a bit musical with light and unbridled colour, and usually rendered in happy rhythms of moving paint into shapes and lines across the field of the canvas.”  Craig has studied New Zealand literature and written poems, moved by lines and journeys, continually tracing a winding linear romance of the roads through hill country.  He has written art criticism and artists’ catalogue essays about things like ‘the mysterious curve of a straight line’ in maps and landscape.  Academic work has included social sciences, cultural studies, health and development, teaching, researching and writing about society and structure, sensibility and narrative, art and pottery in provincial New Zealand and elsewhere.  Considering the influence of being in North Otago Craig comments “I was reminded of the ways painters having been here had worked.  As Gordon Brown wrote ‘...enclosing triangular space stressed by heavy sharp- edged shadows, with lines radiating from the domes of hills’, and with the ‘angularity of spurs’ ... the rhythm of segmented line assembled in a structural order.  Yes and a boldness of design where repetition acts as a strong unifying force.”

b 1961


(Work above)

Title: Limestone Country Environs of Oamaru North Otago $NZD POA   

Size: 70 x 55cm    Medium: Acrylic on Canvas

Title: Maniototo Colours and Numbers    $NZD POA    Size: 102 x 76cm   

Medium: Oil on Canvas

Title: North Otago Landscape By Numbers    $NZD POA    Size: 102 x 76cm   

Medium: Oil on Canvas

Title: Lenticular Otago Peninsular  $NZD POA    Size: 102 x 76cm

Medium: Oil on Canvas

Title: Haymaking Landscape  $NZD POA    Size: 60 x 45cm

Medium: Oil on Canvas

Title: From Black Cat Road Kakanui Range #1 North Otago $NZD POA SOLD   

Size: 70 x 55cm  Medium: Acrylic on Canvas