Gary Waldrom Profile

Gary Waldrom has explored themes of isolation, dream, intuitive  responses to relationships and moreover, a fantasyland of playful and mischievous tricksters: 'Tricky' because they are not letting us know who and what they are, nor from whence they came. He is a Hawkes Bay artist, has been painting since he was a child and is primarily self-taught.      Waldrom's paintings strive to encapsulate childhood on one hand, and the complexity of adulthood on the other. And in the manner of the films of Fellini and Lynch, Waldrom works with the tension between setting and character to maximise the thematic loading of each image/painting.
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Parallels with Francis Bacon have often been drawn, but Waldrom goes further than mutilating his figures with blurring and lack of definition. His is a tender approach: and his manipulations of the strange little figures is subtle, resulting in an invigorating tension.  Waldroms figures are smiling (or at least smirking). They seem to know something that we don't, as they look boldly out of the painting with direct and unflinching (maybe slightly teasing) stare. And they block the view of a background that seems to increasing provide a wide-open space that contrasts dramatically with the detail of the figures, and enhances the sense of their oddness and mysterious isolation.