Stephen McCurdy

 

Born in Roxburgh, Central Otago, in 1949.

 

In the late sixties studied music and cello at Canterbury University.

 

Subsequently worked for thirty years as a composer, music producer and director, production photographer and occasional songwriter for NZ music, theatre, television and film.

 

Began painting seriously in 1996, and has infrequently exhibited.

 

 

'There seem to be two broad strands in my painting. One is figurative, human, and often theatrical. The other is more abstract, though never entirely so. I am interested in myth, in drama and belief.

 

There are always ghosts. Every moment, every place, every event, is a deep palimpsest bearing the mingled traces of countless happenings, feelings, lives, memories, possibilities. Nothing is entirely erased, and nothing is perfectly remembered.

 

The older I get the less linear and the more spatial time becomes. Memories arise, descend, from any time, any place, fresh, sharp, arterial with consequence.

 

I sometimes think I'm trying to put on canvas something raw, inconsolable and strange at the heart of things, that exists in perpetual tension with our yearnings for order and harmony, for justice and connection, for kindness.

 

I look for richness and intricacy of association. I hope for a painting that carries past, present, and possibility. I hope that its shapes and colours, its light and darkness, suggest thought and feeling, character, belief. That its imaginary third dimension feels substantial, not as in vanishing-point perspectival literalism, but subjectively.

 

My paintings are not of things I've seen or imagined.

They're just what I find when I paint.'