Pocket Edition: small works for large walls 2016

"Jo Dalgety is a landscape painter and the ten small works she exhibited in 'Pocket Edition' in 2015 were broody, dark and emotionally raw. This time round the palette has changed markedly and while the images retain their sense of the land's permanence and of underlying past histories and events, it is rather less ominous, less catastrophic past, the strong colour suggesting more positive forces and incidents.

The works clearly lie within a New Zealand landscape tradition, and ow a debt to the 1940s/1950s Christchurch school as exemplified by Rita Angus and Doris Lusk.

Also apparent in the works is the sensibility of Midwest American painter Georgia O'Keeffe who has long been an influence of Dalgety's (and indeed of Rita Angus). "Georgia O'Keeffe summed it up well for me - she never painted creatures" I've always believed that I can get all that into a picture by suggestions. I mean the life that has been lived in a space."

NorthArt 2016