BRIDGET BIDWELL

Bridget Bidwill was born in the Wairarapa in 1956. After secondary school in Hawke’s Bay she studied at the Ilam School of Arts at the University of Canterbury, completing her Diploma of Fine Arts in Painting in 1977. After travelling and living in Europe for three years, Bridget returned to New Zealand and began painting in 1983. Since then she has exhibited regularly in Wellington and Auckland where she lived until 1995, when she and her husband moved to Marlborough. Her paintings have been purchased by corporate, public and private collectors here and abroad.

Bridget’s work has a shadowy likeness to European and British traditions of modernist painting and yet have their own contemporary awareness. Reference to Still-Life and landscape remain evident even in her most abstract works. Her paintings create an aura which seems foreign yet familiar- where glimpses of the abstract and the real world converge. She paints mostly in oils on canvas, board and primed paper. Bridget writes: “One of my primary aims is to use the medium of painting to provoke feeling and thought. Just as instrumental and classical music needs no lyrics to create atmosphere and meaning, abstract painting does not need to copy reality to prove its intellectual and aesthetic worth.” on big scale, providing more graphic visual impact, and etching has an intimacy that provokes the watcher. It encourages the audience to go closer and appreciate all the details on the paper.