Skyspace Series
‘Although her art training led her momentarily to a question the authenticity of a technique that allows colors to fade into each other, she now knew that a delicate taut surface was possible. Virginia wanted to achieve the light of the sky in paintings, the surfaces were to be light rather than color and she would use the colored shapes like "Sparklers that would intercept light with light. Her vision in tact she began to experiment with a new series of paintings.’
Dr. Kerrie M Bryan. Art in Australia 1978
GRAND STREET BLUE
1981
Acrylic on canvas
78in (200cm) high x 120in (305cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
Collection of the University of Queensland
"The Australians Who Painted America"
Terry Ingram - Qantas Magazine 1983
GRAND STREET DAWN
1982
Acrylic on canvas
78in (200cm) high x 120in (305cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
For 25 years from 1975 I lived in my SoHo loft at 66 Grand Street with a virtually unobstructed view facing south. Seeing the dawn sky over Manhattan, with the quiet before the noise of the morning traffic on Canal Street inspired this work.
VIVILA
1980
Acrylic on canvas
45in (114cm) high x 72in (182cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
"On an exposed brick wall hangs Cuppaidge’s 6m painting VEVILA (an Irish Gaelic word meaning melodious, harmonious lady). She is punctilious in naming her works as she is in the execution of them, constantly searching for words with both an abstract and concrete significance.
Cuppaidge uses more that 50 layers of paint to build up the backgrounds to her works, a painstaking technique she developed herself by which each coat of acrylic paint must be rubbed on to the canvas with a sponge and left to dry completely before the next applied."
Jane Mays The Weekend Australian Magazine 12 Nov 1983
URANIA
1981
Acrylic on canvas
40in (101cm) high x 60in (153cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
VALONIA
1983
Acrylic on canvas
45in (114cm) high x 72in (182cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
Collection of Newcastle Region Art Gallery
CERELLA 2
1980
Acrylic on canvas
40in (101cm) high x 60in (153cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
SKYSPACE
1981
Acrylic on canvas
78in (200cm) high x 240in (700cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
In the foyer of the Newcastle Conservatory of Music. Donated by Libby Hathorn, Australian author
“After her show at AM Sachs Gallery in New York, Virginia Cuppaidge began to play off hard-edge rectilinear forms against softly painted areas in such a way as to introduce a kind of landscape-horizon space peculiarly her own. - but on a technical level, it is in the placement of her eccentric shapes that Cuppaidge achieves her aim “not just to paint a beautiful field, but to take the field and turn and twist it around” and forces us to locate ourselves in a point-to-point way that sets at odds our personal equilibrium and visual perception’ Corinne Robins ‘The Pluralist Era” - American Art 1968-1981
NERISSA
1983
Acrylic on canvas
38in (97cm) x 60in (153cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
VIRINDA
1982
Acrylic on canvas
45in (114cm) high x 72in (182cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
NAHAMA
1981
Acrylic on canvas
45in (114cm) high x 72in (182cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
JACINTA
1980
Acrylic on canvas
18in (45cm) high x 20in (50cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
Collection of National Gallery of Australia
“At Gallery A Virginia Cuppaidge opts also for a large scale to express compression and tension in her geometric abstract paintings”.
The intensity of large unbroken rectangles press down on taut thin lines, mixing hard and soft edge color, sometimes dense and uninflected and sometimes scrubbed and changing. These works that for all their apparent simplicity hold within them slowly revealing subtleties.
Ruth Faeber - The Australian Jewish Times, 1976