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Profile
Grahame Sydney has been described as a ‘clever magican’, best known for his luminous landscapes of Central Otago. He has worked widely in oils, watercolours, tempera, etchings and lithographs. His work is held in high esteem and sought after world-wide.
Selected published works
Timeless Land, 1995; The Art of Grahame Sydney, 2000; White Silence: Grahame Sydney's Antarctica, 2008.
Publishers
Longacre Press
www.longacre.co.nz
Biography
Grahame Sydney, ONZM, was born in Dunedin in 1948 and graduated with a BA (English and Geography) from the University of Otago in 1969. For almost 30 years his paintings have been inspirational with their ability to evoke a sense of wonder and kinship. From childhood drawings of Disney characters in the 1950s, through to the large majestic landscapes of Otago, Sydney's passion for painting has never diminished. Following his first solo exhibition at the Moray Gallery in 1972, he spent a period overseas in the United Kingdom and Europe before returning to Dunedin in 1974 to begin life as a full-time artist. In 1978 Sydney was the Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago in Dunedin.
Timeless Land (1995) is a collaboration with his close friends, Owen Marshall and Brian Turner. It features 50 of Sydney's finest paintings of Central Otago, poems from Turner and stories from Marshall. The book won the Supreme Award for Printing in the NZ Pride in Print Awards and received a Premier Print Award from the Printing Industries of America. The Art of Grahame Sydney (2000) won the Montana Medal for Non-Fiction in the 2000 Montana Book Awards, as well as the Illustrative Arts Category Award and the Readers' Choice Award. It offers 143 reproductions of Sydney’s paintings, nine photographs, a personal response by poet Brian Turner, essays from art curators Michael Findlay and Belinda Jones, and an extended and insightful interview with photographer Reg Graham. It has been reprinted four times.
Sydney visited Antarctica in 2003 and 2006 as a guest of Antarctica New Zealand. The photographs that resulted from these trips have been exhibited at numerous art galleries and will be published by Penguin Group (NZ) late in 2008. In 2003, when Sydney was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to painting, he said ‘If nothing else, what it really shows when people like me get an award like this, is that New Zealand arts patronage has the courage to back its own’.
Sydney was an advisor for the Illustrative category of the 2006 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. He lives with his wife near St Bathans, Central Otago.
Grahame Sydney’s website is www.grahamesydney.com
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