Street Hermit

In the Autumn of 2016 Graeme Todd was invited by gallerist Alessandra Bonomo to live and work at the Eremo de Santa Maddelena in Monteluco and subsequently at the Mahler LeWitt studios in nearby Spoleto by Carol Le Witt.
Todd worked on his own at the mountain hermitage and at the studios for a period of two months. During this time he made a series of paintings to be exhibited in March 2018 at Galleria Alessandra Bonomo in Rome alongside an 80pp book with two commissioned essays, published by the gallery.
In the 12th century Eremo (hermitage) on the slopes of Monteluco, working in a small scale – mostly hand sized and slightly larger - Todd has entered a world of open diversity and retrospective reflection. This by no means removes him from the flow of the now - in fact this distance is a constructed bemused withdrawal - to place himself at a vantage point both literally and metaphorically, from which he may have a very open view of the past – there are references to the fantastic, the layered mark, the art of the outsider, the obsessive, the tiered, the layered, the mad and the random and their conjunctions with the present. This is not so atypical of the artist today. It is, however, particular in its emphasis on the indirect hierarchies and references that run through the works. Behind the use of landscape quotation and its consequent ideal of romantic striving, there is a more ironic exercise that moves through a succession of observations drawn directly from the mountain environment itself and from material almost accidentally found or browsed.
Todd’s Street Hermit paintings are the product of of a careful juxtaposition of Idea and form – through means of a counterpointed tension between layers, image and abstraction are melded into one multi layered painted skin.