How does Callum Arnold achieve such astonishing compositions and effects?
His layered viewpoints create transitory scenes that are at once moving toward and away from the viewer. Arnold’s landscape paintings are a mastery of atmosphere and tone. Painted in the early morning mist, while everything is just waking he captures and mixes up a sense of time, place and solitude within the land.

These are literal and felt journeys through the New Zealand landscape. They are scenes on the cusp of the rural and built up urban environs, where signals of humankind such as road markings, power poles and lampposts are interspersed throughout the landscape. Roads become geographical features “constructed to dissect the land into portions.” (1)

“My interest lies in the disjointed construction that memory creates through the influence of fleeting visions of land,” he says. “The attempt is to depict a more universal view rather than a regional specific location.” (2)

1. Callum Arnold, Artist statement, 2006.
2. Ibid.