Cherry Hood "Now and Then"

Cherry Hood Exhibition

Now and Then

Opening 3 November 2006 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Two years ago artist Cherry Hood retreated from the fast pace of city life in Sydney to a rural/bush property in Towrang near Goulburn, NSW. This change of scenery has directly influenced her practice and her work now reflects the forests, history and immediate rural surroundings.

Hood is perhaps best known for her large scale portraits of young children rendered in watercolour on paper and canvas, although it is her confronting portraits of young boys that captured the collective imagination. Imbued with the taut atmosphere of burgeoning adolescence, Hood’s images capture a youthful anxiety and resonate with a gentle tension. Her subject’s trademark penetrating gaze implicates the viewer as voyeur, so that these images become a meditation on beauty, sexuality and innocence.

Hood masterfully employs the humble medium of watercolour playing up the subtleties of the material to best suggest the delicacy of her subject matter. Hood masterfully employs the medium of watercolour playing up the subtleties of the material to best suggest the delicacy of her subject matter. In 2004 she collaborated with infamous American writer JT Leroy to illustrate his new book Harold’s End, creating a series of works printed by the Australian Print Workshop in Melbourne that were shown at Deitch Projects in New York.

With this new exhibition of work entitled Now and Then, Hood takes as stimulus her newly discovered rural surroundings, admitting that she found the process of incorporating the scale of the dramatic landscape challenging. Painted in watercolour and oil (thanks to her new huge airy studio) on canvas these new works pay homage to the grand tradition of Australian landscape painting at the same time as they sit outside conventional imagery of the bush. Part idyll and part observation, she creates a series of narratives that collapse the past with contemporary life.

Working from old photographs collected from locals and sourced from books documenting the history of the area, Hood’s new paintings connect old with new, and are imbued with a nostalgia mediated through a contemporary viewpoint. Hood’s research into the area revealed that famous Australian artist Sydney Long who is best known for his art nouveau allegories with the Australian bush as backdrop was born in Goulburn. The trees that characterised Long’s dramatic scenes are captured in Hood’s new body of work; the artist’s trademark starkly blank white backgrounds are now filled with the distinct and peculiar curves of the manifera and rossi gum trees that populate her farm.

Cherry Hood has a Masters of Visual Art from Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney and has studied painting at The National Art School and sculpture at The University of Fine Art, Perugia, Italy. In 2002 Cherry Hood won the Archibald Prize with a portrait of the pianist Simon Tedeschi entitled Unplugged. She has twice been a finalist in the Portia Geach Memorial Award and was the winner of the 2003 Kedumba Art Award. Her work is held in numerous private and public collections including The Art Gallery of New South Wales, The National Gallery of Australia, Artbank, Penrith Regional Gallery, Maroondah Regional Gallery, Muswellbrook Regional Gallery and Goulburn Regional Gallery.

Alison Kubler