Blue talor

Virginia Cuppaidge is an Australian-American abstract painter currently based in Newcastle, NSW. Born in Brisbane in 1943, Cuppaidge first came to prominence in Australia in the 1960s, exhibiting at Hungry Horse Art Gallery and Aladdin Gallery in Sydney and Brian Johnstone Gallery in Brisbane. In May 1969, she joined a small group of Australian artists, writers and gallerists relocating to New York, considered the capital of the art world at the time. There, she connected with sculptor Clement Meadmore and art dealer Max Hutchinson, assisting the latter with establishing his gallery in SoHo.

'Blue talor' dates from this exciting and productive phase in Cuppaidge's career in the early to mid-1970s. Typical of her work during this period, it is a large-scale painting comprising an expansive colour-field that is intersected by parallel bands of contrasting colour running across the top and bottom of the picture. Although indebted to the influence of the New York School, the work's horizontality and wide-openness are deeply suggestive of Australian landscape. Indeed, Cuppaidge acknowledges this suggestion: 'No matter how hard I tried to create images that were born in New York City, the nature of my homeland made its mark on my paintings' [1].

1. Virginia Cuppaidge quoted in Lara Nicholls, 'Virginia Cuppaidge: Into the unknown' in Artonreview 86, winter 2016, p 53