Maysey Craddock

Opening Reception with the Artist:
* Thursday, November 2, 5:00 pm – 8:00 pm
* Saturday, November 4th from 10:00 am -12:00 pm
Exhibition Dates:
* November 2 – January 6, 2024

Sarah Shepard Gallery is pleased to welcome Memphis based artist Maysey Craddock for her first solo exhibition with the gallery featuring seven new paintings.

A land apart, a world within.

Join Sarah Shepard and Maysey Craddock for the opening of Craddock’s new show! Get a chance to meet the artist and dive deeper into the thought process and the majesty of her artworks.

Maysey Craddock

Best known for her visceral gouache paintings of ephemeral landscapes, Maysey Craddock examines the dualities and mysteries of nature and those relationships to space and time.

Through saturated earth tones and translucent elemental layers, she depicts the spaces in between, the interactions of nature and architecture, and what happens beyond the grasp of human control.

Her imagery is dense and fluid, with trees, watery surfaces and roots figuring prominently as metaphors of the eternal cycles of death and rebirth, and the inevitability of entropy.

Based on her own photographs of wetlands and other fragile wild spaces, her process layers intricate drawings and performative painting onto found objects (typically brown paper bags that have been carefully embroidered together) – a conceptual regeneration which mirrors the geological processes she depicts and references the way we seek to both shape and preserve what we see in nature.

She compares her process to a familiar expression: “There is a chunk of time where I am only seeing the trees, and then towards the end I begin to stand back more, and try to see the forest. It becomes a balance between light and dark, the contrast of tight color and washy strokes, all weaving together until I feel, instinctually, that the painting has achieved the perfect harmony and tension. The built paper and the unbuilt image merge.”

Like the cycles of the sun, her work transports the viewer into a meditative place that is nostalgic and rhythmic, yet fragile, hopeful, and wild – an opportunity to begin, again.