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  Daisy Craddock
Reviews
  New York Times
Reviews
By Ken Johnson

New York Times, October, 2001



In a gallery just a short walk from the ruins of the World Trade Center it's hard not to experience Daisy Craddock's luminous land and seascapes as images of grief and consolation.

Of course she could not have had such a specific purpose in mind. Harking back to Impressionism, her dry, drab green, dreamily hazy pictures of big oaks or magnolias in the Old South are about light, atmosphere and space; and they are about old Modernist play between illusion and abstraction, surface and depth. Yet there is a funereal sadness in these old trees, draped by Spanish moss-bowing low over glassy pools of water-that seems uncannily right for this moment.

The mood brightens in Ms. Craddock's seascapes: pictures of foamy, jade-green waves washing up on sand in the foreground, with the horizon a high, distant line under bands of blue sky. The tension betweenexpansive space and thin paint rubbed into burt-sienna ground calls to mind Rothko. But rather than existential anxiety, in Ms. Craddock's evocation of an imperturable immensity one feels timeless rhythm and summery light, and Emersonian divintiy that may be comforting in times of mourning, confusion and fear.