Interview with Criss Canning and Robyn Berkeley

Criss Canning

1947 -

Criss Canning, born in Melbourne in 1947, is one of Australia's leading still life artists. Her rich strong paintings are unmistakably her own. Incredibly accomplished technically, her work is sumptuous in colour, complex in design and sensuous in effect. Canning's paintings repay careful and repeated viewing. Each brushstroke is lovingly and lusciously applied. The objects in her work, the flowers, ceramics, trays and fabrics are arranged and rearranged until a wonderful balance and harmony is achieved. Only then does Canning put paint to canvas.

Criss Canning has her studio in an 1860s farm house in the farming district of Ascot, north of Ballarat where she lives with her husband, David Glenn owner of Lambley Nursery. Together they have created an internationally renowned garden. Plant material from the garden is a major inspiration in her paintings. Canning's brave and exciting use of colour, her beautiful brushwork and her meticulous compositions are much loved by those collectors who have bought her paintings over the last 40 years or so.

Criss Canning has held seventeen one woman exhibitions at leading art galleries, (most of them sell out shows) in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane as well as exhibiting in numerous group shows both in Australia and overseas. Canning is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery and major private collections both in Australia and overseas.

The first major retrospective exhibition of Criss Canning, one of Australia's foremost contemporary still life painters, was held at the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery in February 2007. It then travel to the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery in Julythat year.

A major monograph by David Thomas with an introduction by Dame Elisabeth Murdoch was published by Macmillan in 2007 to celebrate Criss Canning and her remarkable body of work to coincide with the exhibition. This has recently been revised (late 2008) and re-printed as the first edition sold out within 6 month.

Giles Auty in a Brisbane Courier Mail review of a show at Philip Bacon's Gallery wrote "Flowers, fabrics and ceramics are merely props employed in remarkable essays in pictorial placement. If you thought the art of composition was dead, think again. Canning's work has something of the calm exactitude of a Zen garden and can induce comparable sensations of serenity"

Curator Anna Clabburn has written that "Her work, like her personal nature, is boldly independent and full of a rich joy in life and its visual beauty."

Collections

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Ballarat Fine Art Gallery
Artbank
Private collections in London, Hong Kong, Paris, Japan, Indonesia, Canada, U.S.A, U.K and Australia.

Berkeley Edtions

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Australian Artists * Jason Benjamin * Charles Blackman OBE * Arthur Boyd AO, AC, OBE * David Boyd * Criss Canning * Fred Cress AM * Ray Crooke AM * Melissa Egan * Frank Hodgkinson AM * Malcolm Jagamarra * Jasper Knight * Colin Lanceley * David Larwill * Kerrie Lester * Bob Marchant * Helen Norton * Margaret Olley AC, AO * Kevin Pearsh * Clifton Pugh AO * Craig Ruddy * Martin Sharp OA * Garry Shead * Andrew Southall * Tim Storrier AM * Salvatore Zofrea