The Nature of Painting.
"Virginia Cuppaidge addresses one of the principle tenets of abstraction: the experience of nature is more than the eye can see - the cosmic realms and the microscopic world also can be realized through abstracted images."
Joan Marter, professor Contemporary Painting and Sculpture at Rutgers University
QUIET NIGHT
2000
Acrylic on canvas
78in (200cm) high x 120in (305cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
Private Collection
CITY HARVEST
1992
Oil on canvas
38in (97cm) high x 36in (91cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
Collection of Australian Ambassador to the United Nations, New York
" Exuberantly and with a touch of native ingenuity, Virginia Cuppaidge plots an aesthetic course that is parallel with the most immediate and vibrant responses to cubist and fauve discoveries. Raised in Australia, Cuppaidge arrived in New York in 1969 to absorb early modern first hand. The spirit inspired her, and something she shares with her predecessors, including the Synchronists, Joseph Stella, Sonia Delaunay and John Marin, is an emotional approach to canvas as a color-structured exaltation of nature-as-cosmos continually approaching and swerving from the concrete."
Rachel Youens – Cover Magazine 1995
CLOUDS WITHIN THE MOUNTAIN
1988
Oil/ Acrylic on canvas
38in (97cm) high x 36in (91cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
Collection of Embassy of Australia, DC Washington
“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
INSIDE THE GARDEN
1994/95
Oil on canvas
78in (200cm) high x 108in (275cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
1996 exhibited in National Gallery of Victoria, Joan and Peter Clemenger Triennial. 2013 In the collection of Macquarie University, Sydney
"When I traveled 14 of my paintings to four museums in Canada, including the Yukon it became very clear so far away from home that my work is directly from my Australian experience.
The Yukon felt to me like Australia, only in sub-zero weather (I was there in January). The light from the Artic gave the Yukon sky a pale mauve and pink pristine look, but even in its beauty it had a raw, primordial feel to it that I am really interested in tapping into.
The beginning of things … life in its most truthful state … even the sophisticated life that we live."
Canadian Heritage traveling ART exhibition 1998 including The Whitehorse Art Museum, Yukon
LIFEWAVE
1986
Acrylic on canvas
72in (182cm) high x 96in (244cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
“Like the painter herself, Cuppaidge’s abstract works are positive and optimistic. The rich opulence of her large “LIFE WAVE” of acrylic and oil on canvas – releases an imprisoned splendor of floating colored forms out of eddying waves of translucent color and reined in by crossed lines of hard, bright metallic color. Here we have the painter’s central piece and prime work – an exuberant abstraction and yet allied to nature mood and place.”
Phyllis Woolcock – “Hot Summer in Manhattan”- Brisbane Courier Mail 1988
LEAF SHIELDS
1991
Gouche on paper
30in (76cm) high x 22in (56cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
Light and Energy infuse the abstract canvases and works on paper of Virginia Cuppaidge an Australian born artist now exhibiting at The Stephen Rosenberg Gallery.
Grace Glueck, The New York Observer February 1993
SKY IS EVERYWHERE
1992
Acrylic/Oil on canvas
72in (182cm) high x 96in (244cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
Collection of Jazz Museum in Harlem, NYC
Galleries plus the jazz are one of the things she likes most about New York - she recalls seeing Thelonious Monk play in Sydney.
New York beckoned as the most alluring marriage of art and music. – It is only when she has finished a major work that she treats herself to a visit to one of SoHo’s jazz clubs, places like the Village Vanguard or Knitting Factory. Ultimately, for Cuppaidge, painting is about maintaining a receptive mind.
"When you impose your will it’s not going to work out"
Alan Attwood - A conversation with Colour Sydney Morning Herald 1996
STAR MAP
1994
Gouche on paper
22in (56cm) high x 38in (76cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
Harlem school of arts, NYC
"The cosmos has always been a theme that has captured Cuppaidge’s imagination. In "Star Map", the binaries of dark and glowing, massive and miniscule unified and fragmented evoke the experience of a starry evening in a sky that never ends.
Cuppaidge need to be applauded for the rich and vibrant canvases and works on paper that never get stale. Her art brims with new ideas, and her energy abounds.
Joan Marter - "The Nature of Panting" - Rosenberg+ Kaufman Fine Art , New York - 1995
CENTRE OF THE BEGINNING
1989
Oil on canvas
84in (213cm) high x 180in (457cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
Collection of Newcastle Region Art Gallery
“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
WHEN SHIPS COME IN
1992
Oil on canvas
72in (143cm) high x 96in (244cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
Since her arrival she has hardly left the city and describes herself as "the most provincial New Yorker" The museums, galleries, theaters, jazz clubs and her friends are enough. She shakes her head at recent talk that New York is fading as the center of international art.
When I first got here, you have no idea how many people said, "Oh, you’ve come too late, it’s all happened". SoHo wasn’t even invented yet.
Susan Wyndham Travels With My Art, Weekend Australian 1995
SUNLIGHT AND SEA
2000
Oil/ Acrylic on canvas
96in (244cm) high x 72in (182cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
Looking back over Cuppaidge’s work, it would seem that although her paintings re non-representational, they are influenced primarily by her experience of the to countries in which she has lived: Australia and the United States.
For the past thirty-five years Brisbane-born Cuppaidge has lived in New York. Like several other expatriate artists of her generations she has maintained contact with Australia and exhibits regularly in both countries.
However unlike many of her fellow artists who in the 1960s left Australia to work in London, Cuppaidge had always wanted to go to New York because it seemed the most vibrant, international art community for someone who intended to paint large abstract works, and because she wanted to experience paintings by artists such as Kenneth Noland, Mark Rothko and Wilem De Kooning, which until then she had seen only in reproduction in Art International.
Christine France - Art and Australia 2000