“Sydney … plies his craft with great skill and subtlety… These hills, these skies give us a voice that is unique, a voice that is evoked by the art of Grahame Sydney. It is the voice of us all.”
Keith Stewart, Art Critic.
Grahame Sydney
Fascinated by the magic of line and paint since childhood, Grahame Sydney has become one of New Zealand’s most significant and enduring artists, anchored firmly in the heartland of Central Otago.
Born in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1948 he graduated Bachelor of Arts in 1969 and Secondary Teachers College in 1970. Following his first solo exhibition at the Moray Gallery (Dunedin) in 1972, he spent a period overseas in the United Kingdom and Europe before returning to Dunedin in 1974 to begin life as a full-time artist.
His work now spans over 4 decades and encompasses oils, watercolours, egg tempera, lithographs, etching, photography and film. Rarely exhibiting, Grahame’s works are held in private collections through-out the world and represented in the collections of New Zealand’s major galleries and museums. The iconic ‘Rozzie at Pisa’ hangs in Wellington at Te Papa Tongarewa, and his ‘Self-Portrait at Fifty’ is held by the Christchurch Art Gallery.
Painting now for a private client list and always a meticulously slow worker, he generally produces no more than six works a year. His paintings are rarely exhibited for public sale. However his lithographs and photographs are highly regarded and sought after and the reproduced art prints of his work have sold in their thousands. He was awarded an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) for his services to painting in 2003.
Sydney is also the author of Promised Land (2009), his Antarctic photographs are collected in White Silence (2008) and his Central Otago paintings were first published in the much-loved Timeless Land (1995 [now in its 5th reprint]). To learn more about the artist and his work we recommend reading the Montana Award winning book The Art of Grahame Sydney (2000).
Grahame is well known for his environmental activism and is currently a spokesperson for the ‘Save Central’ campaign to prevent large scale wind farms from dominating the Central Otago landscape.
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