Bridget Bidwil’s work is strongly influenced by British Modernism and the artists associated with the ‘St Ives School’ including Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and William Scott. In the 1940s through early 1960s, St Ives became the centre of a movement that saw artists producing works that drew on Braque, Matisse and Picasso’s cubism along with the shapes and colours of the wild Cornish coast.

The standard Cubist repertoire of objects such as jugs and glasses arranged as flat shapes on the picture plane became a jumping off point for the introduction of more textured surfaces that were part of the St Ives landscape. As Nicholson was influenced by the several visits he made to Paris, so Bidwill was influenced by her own years spent in Europe, the colours of buildings, weathered plaster, stone, trees, the landscape shaped by thousands of years of human habitation.

Bidwill is fascinated with surfaces and often works her canvases and boards heavily with several layers of paint applied and removed to slowly build up a backdrop which shimmers with suggestion. She then overpaints and adds layers of her familiar shapes which she draws from nature and her immediate environment.

Her use of freeform shapes such as vessels, bottles, leaves, ovals, are in part ‘still life’ but are also intended to create an element of landscape. Her recent work has an increasing use of texture either through painting onto layered or collaged canvas with variations in surface elements and an increasing sense of scale.

Bridget Bidwill was born in the Wairarapa in 1956. She studied at Ilam School of Arts at Canterbury University, graduating with a Diploma of Fine Arts in Painting in 1977. She exhibits regularly in Wellington and Auckland where she lived until 1995, before moving to Marlborough. Her paintings reference local forms, rounded hill shapes, darker patches against lighter skies, trees, rubbed surfaces, exposed landscapes, elemental colours, the earthy, dry colours of Italy which find their parallels in Marlborough.

‘One of my primary aims as a painter is to provoke feeling and thought. I am not telling specific stories, but leaving room for the viewer to engage, I want my paintings to have a sense of mystery, to be illusive and lyrical, open to interpretation.’

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