Producing dynamic compositions that achieve a synthesis of landscape painting and abstraction through gestural painted marks and complex layering of visual elements, Callum Arnold is establishing himself as a significantly skilled and confident painter. Carefully considered subtle shifts in light, shade, opacity or scale solicit various and altered views that disorientate and re-orientate at every turn despite the familiarity of the landscape presented. Forms and fleeting shadows fragment and unfurl as quickly as they emerge in a harmonious rhythm of flux. Intersecting lines, layered imagery and fractured planes appear to migrate within the surface of the painting kindling the suggestion of passing time and memory. “We are captured in a moment of cross-fade between the past and the present, the picturesque and the documentary, between memory and witness.” (1)

Sojourn, Arnold’s much-anticipated second solo exhibition at milford galleries queenstown, reveals the artists inland journey southwards through the Lindis Valley to Queenstown. From the crisp chill of windswept snow collected against the steep tussock-clad hillside in Cold Pass (Lindis Valley), the looming heavy sky and misted atmosphere in Valley II (Lindis Valley) as it blankets the land with its cool touch to the comforting warmth of the late winter sun bathing the land in gold-tinted light in Crown Range, Arnold’s keen ability to convey the physical reality and sense of place in his painting is profound.

Making an emblematic presence in Lake Path (Diamond Lake, Wanaka) and Reflecting (Mackenzie basin) the figure is a new muse for Arnold. Not only do we find that the figure amplifies the sheer scale and expansiveness of the landscape depicted but it also makes an allusion to that familiar physical sense of journey and movement so distinctive to Arnold’s practice.

Paths of water wistfully stretching into the distant horizon in a mirage of evaporating reflections in Lake Path direct our attentive gaze subconsciously as do the bright blue watery depths of the canals as they weave a threaded path in Reflecting. Power poles, sign posts and roads intervene and dissect in works such as Valley II and Rest Stop (Lindis Valley) as if to offer a momentary lull before tempting us on another path, an alternative viewpoint.

Sojourn reveals a progression in Callum Arnold’s practice in terms of insight, complexity, stylistic substance and painterly skill. It is clear too that a heightened spatial awareness and sense of journey along with the interconnected emergence of the figure (as both metaphor and subject) are becoming increasingly important and central to the narrative in his work. Arnold’s dedication to a constantly evolving practice further establishes his importance as a remarkably assured and skilled artist who is reinvigorating and reinterpreting the experience of the New Zealand landscape in a visual language which is entirely his own and just as unique as the environment he travels through.

1. Review by Richard Dingwall, Otago Daily Times, 23 March 2006.