Here to There is the first joint exhibition between recent University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts graduates Richard Elderton and Lucia Sidonio. Ahead of the opening Elderton and Sidonio discussed their works with City Art Reader editor Cameron Ralston. Here to There opens 5.30pm Tuesday 8 November and runs through to 28 November at City Art Depot.
Cameron Ralston: Did you two study together?
Richard Elderton: We were both at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts at the same time, but in different years.
Lucia Sidonio: Richard was in the year above me.
RE: We both had exhibitions as part of The Den project as well. We’re also doing this year’s Art Fair as part of a group too. So, there’ve been a few opportunities to compare and see our artworks together.
LS: In the painting studios at university, often people would wander about and end up chatting to different year groups.
Sea Stack (Gold), Richard Elderton, oil on stretched canvas, 760x1020mm, 2022
CR: Do you see some commonality between the works? Or are they quite different?
RE: Stylistically, obviously, they’re very different. But it’s interesting when looking at them side by side, you do begin to notice some parallels colouristically and compositionally. Both are more figurative and representational in today’s art world.
CR: What’s popular does seem to swing between the abstract and figurative. What was the vibe of the art school at the time?
RE: It felt like figurative was coming back in. More people were trying out figuration than in the years above us.
Toto and the Treasure Nugget, Lucia Sidonio, oil on stretched canvas, 450x350mm, 2022
CR: Both of your works still have elements of abstraction. Especially yours Lucia. Thematic-wise, are you coming from different places? When I look at the works, I could read them as representations of memories that have nostalgic value or that come from a personal place. The representation of a beach could be a significant place to you Richard. From that perspective they might come from a similar angle.
RE: I think that’s spot on. We were talking about the significance of time – the passage of time and memory.
LS: We talked about temporality as a word around these too.
RE: We also discussed spiritual significance or the soul of a painting you were saying Lucia.
LS: When I place a figure in a painting, I try to capture the soul of the figure without being too literal. In a sense, I think that Richard tries to do that too.
RE: That resonated with me. On a spectrum of intellectual conceptual art to expressionistic impressionistic naturalistic stuff, it’s more on the latter end.
CR: Are they real places or memories, or are they imagined scenes for both of you?
LS: Mine are based on images which are locations that I know. They’re not entirely imagined but as I was painting them, they did become less of one specific place, and more of an unidentified place.
RE: I would say that of my work too. I got the idea of the sea stacks from driving up and down Kaikōura. I have a studio in Blenheim, so I do the trip often. I like seeing the rocks and figured, why don’t I paint one. It’s not any specific location down that road. When I’m looking back now, it’s a little bit of that and a little bit of landscapes from my childhood back in Japan, morphed together to become a sort of imaginary landscape. It does have that personal element.
LS: Similarly, these images relate to my childhood outside of New Zealand. I was born in England.
Sea Stack (Blue), Richard Elderton, oil on stretched canvas, 760x1020mm, 2022
CR: Does using personal identity as source material come up a lot in your practices?
LS: I’d say yes for me.
RE: I wrestle with it. Part of me wants to suppress it because at the end of the day I do want to do things that are personal to me, but I also hope that people can relate to it. I restrain myself; I don’t want to entirely be in my own bubble so to speak. I want to hit upon a more general broad thing that people can relate to, that is maybe a bit more universal.
CR: I think that universality can be seen in both your works. Especially when you talk about the soul of a painting that people can engage with. It seems like there’s an element of nostalgia to some of these things – you were talking about reminiscing about Japan Richard, and England for you Lucia.
LS: The term nostalgia can be a bit tainted. It comes with certain connotations and baggage. I try to find a happy medium between what I am personally connected to, through the photographs for example, but then finding something that the viewer can relate to. This series is the first time I’ve done outdoor scenes. I think they allowed me to play with paint quite a bit, like how Richard has talked to me about how he enjoys figurative painting which allows him to play with paint more.
RE: It’s an excuse to hang some of the painterly practical aspects of it.
Yellow Anorak, Lucia Sidonio, oil on stretched canvas, 350x450mm, 2022
CR: Have each of you been playing with new things in these works?
RE: I would say so. My previous artworks were a lot more overall in composition where every corner of the image would be doing stuff and have noise. But I’ve tried to tighten and clean it up and focus on the planes. There’s definitely an abstract mindset behind that.
CR: What about you Lucia?
LS: Definitely in terms of working in layers more. I sat with the paintings longer than I have with other works. Usually it’s more of an immediate process, I pump them out very quickly. Whereas this big one here [Lodge Hill Snow], which was the departure point for the series, went through many stages. I have often struggled with how to resolve backgrounds when placing figures in an open, undefined space. I feel like the figures in this large painting appear more grounded than in my past works.
RE: Part of the appeal of working on figurative art for me is that you work in an abstract mindset anyway, whatever you’re doing. Such as a tiny corner or slapping on brush marks that don’t make sense until it falls into place. The appeal is the way those abstractions get contextualised in an image. If you were to crop a little segment, say of a Monet it might turn into a Joan Mitchell painting but that reads entirely different to when it was part of a lily pond or something. That juxtaposition is interesting to me.
Lodge Hill Snow, Lucia Sidonio, oil on stretched canvas, 1200x900mm, 2022
CR: Do you both have artists that you’ve been looking at? The sea stacks you can pretty immediately draw a comparison to Monet’s haystacks. Do you have pronounced influences?
LS: One of my favourite styles is Fauvism. I like using saturated colours. Colouristically, I always refer back to Matisse even though these works could be viewed as tame compared to his work. Aside from that, I have been interested in paintings by Sanya Kantarovsky, a Russian painter who does quite satirical works which sometimes feature children. I was looking at him and how he creates narrative. His works can be quite sinister, but I didn’t necessarily want to evoke that in my own paintings. It helped me to look at his work to understand how to represent childhood with some kind of nuance.
RE: I have a lot of heroes I look up to – as you said, the obvious ones like Monet, but also Gustave Courbet and the transition from romanticism to realism is really interesting to me. Especially in the early stages, at the time I’m sure people saw it as this entirely different thing that was such a breakaway from the tradition. But now a couple of hundred years later we can see all these travels between the movements.
Five Pendulums, Richard Elderton, oil on board, 300x400mm, 2022
CR: You both use the light in the works in interesting ways. Snow is obviously quite a difficult thing to paint, it’s interesting how you dealt with it Lucia with the tones and colours coming through. Then you, Richard, have quite directional light in your pieces. These pendulums, are they reflecting your studio space? What’s going on?
RE: I look around the studio and think, ‘I can use that corner’. I like making abstractions. At some point you don’t have to follow anything, it’s just noisy enough to get away with randomness.
LS: Do you own a pendulum?
RE: I don’t, I should though. I saw footage of a retrospective of Gerhard Richter’s work and he had a massive Foucault pendulum. They’re really cool, they were one of the first scientific experiments which showed the world goes around. So, you swing this massive pendulum and because the world goes around if it’s closer to the poles during the entirety of the day, even though it swings on a single axis, it will do a 360-degree motion of that swing. It’s just cool.
CR: Do you both have studio spaces? Where are you painting?
LS: Richard has a more established one. Mine is just in someone’s garage.
RE: My studio used to be a garage. I’m using my great uncle, JS Parker’s, studio. In terms of influences, I should mention his name because there’s still a lot of his paintings in his studio. He passed away a few years ago. I’m trying to do my own thing, but inevitably his stuff creeps in because it’s right there.
CR: How are you both finding the post-graduate life of an artist? It’s always interesting hearing an artist’s journey out of art school.
LS: Last year I didn’t do any painting because I was doing further study which was unrelated to artmaking. This was my first year coming back to painting. I found it quite interesting to be outside of an academic context and just paint without being regularly told that it needs to be more considered. I’m not dismissing my education at all, it’s just that you have to find a balance between the intellectual backing and reasoning to what you’re doing and your gut feeling and intuition.
CR: What about you Richard? Is it liberating, or intimidating, to be out on your own?
RE: Both, I think. I’m finding that at university I could experiment a lot more freely and take bold risks. I still try to take risks because it’s fun that way but at the same time I do find myself trying to resolve things and find a distinctive thing I can call my own now.
