“Each Arnold painting seeks to lock onto some epiphany, some moment of serenity, and at the same time the unstable realism suggests fault-lines at work: the landscape juddering or blurring in response to unseen forces. It’s all a teasing play on structure and erasure, on vanishing and appearances, and demonstrates Arnold’s mastery of formal balance.” (1)

Callum Arnold’s paintings in Horizon feature the many landscapes and transitions that occur on the road journey between Christchurch and Queenstown, through the centre of the South Island. In Southern Landscape, Sign Arnold explicitly quotes the quintessential Canterbury artist W.A. (Bill) Sutton. In this generous, open-handed act of homage he establishes the art conceit of a sign revealing not naming words but the landscape itself. Arnold’s painterly objectives – structural elements, landscape synthesis, time’s passage, a journey being sensed through movement devices – are folded in and out of the viewer’s consciousness. A tree grows out of a road; the road leads through the sign, the foreground envelopes the participant.

Arnold has risen to national prominence quickly and this is undoubtedly due to his emerging with a fully formed visual language entirely his own and array of painterly skills other artists remark on. In Southern Landscape, Lake Road he demonstrates this versatility and art literacy by establishing visual rhythms and tonal melodies that are abstract in character. Southern Landscape, Mountain is a different palette entirely. The landscape is an arid (but colourful) desert and the road folds into terraces and seems to stop, disappear. Everything leads to a central point but skewed to and from the left hand side of the road, as from the passenger’s perspective. Repetitions and over-lain diagonals read like reflections of what has been passed while in the distance an unnamed mountain looms and denies entry. In the directly related works Southern Landscape, Mountain Pass and Southern Landscape, Mountain Road Arnold goes beyond the physical barrier of the mountain into a succession of alpine valleys. We see light as various as bright and harsh, occluded and tonal.

Every journey begins and ends somewhere. In another suite of works Arnold reminds us how close the landscape seems from inside a car and how it gets carved up by the rural architecture of posts, trees, fences. Southern Landscape, Passing and Southern Landscape, Fields are linear narratives of what is sliding by outside the window. Southern Landscape, Return and Southern Landscape, Turn Off are (as in all of his works) location specific poems of place but with the painterly metaphysics of warmth and light (in middle distance) emerging to show the way.

1. David Eggleton, “High Visibility,” Listener, 1 April 2006.