Craddock told us that, in these works, in effect, she purposefully toys with the notion of pure color when it comes to the impact she intends for them to have on viewers, even as she remains faithful to — or “pure” with regard to — her subject matter.

She explained, “Although, in these diptychs, I use the same oil pastel and Arches paper as I do in my landscape studies, these works appear to be abstract blocks of color. Drawn from life, they depend on an ‘Aha!’ moment, when a viewer realizes these are up-close depictions of the skin of a fruit or vegetable on the left and its flesh on the right — or maybe not. Devoid of what I call ‘the space between,’ these diptychs are built up of many layers; they’re scumbled, scraped and burnished by hand until they’re also about surface sheen, or incidents such as fingermarks and wipes, and of course color, always about color.”

– Edward M. Gómez, "WASHING OUR HANDS AND THINKING ABOUT “PURITY”: WHAT’S AUTHENTIC? WHAT’S REAL?", Brut Journal, December 2021

Craddock, a native of Tennessee who is known in New York for her abstracted paintings of landscapes, takes an original slant on a traditional subject. She attacks nature studies through her own meticulous approach to surface, form, and materials. Using oil pastel and oil stick, she exploits the power of color and touch, reducing observed reality to its most essential quality of textured surface. Juxtaposing on the left of a diptych the exterior and on the right the interior of a fruit achieves a tense poise between description and abstraction. At rst glance, you’re sure these are minimalistic color- eld paintings. But look harder and you’ll see they are literal renderings. Craddock subtly layers colors in varied tones and hues, then scrapes, burnishes, and scumbles the oily-chalky layers to make them translucent or variegated.

— Carol Strickland, "Daisy Craddock Harvests Summer Produce At Its Peak," June 15, 2017

For twenty years Daisy Craddock has used oil paint on canvas to survey the possibilities of landscape painting. She does not produce views on nature captured in the moment. Rather her subject is as much the process of painting as it is the observation of the actual place.

— Andrea Kirsch, "Two Places Recent Paintings, Drawings and Monoprints", Cheryl Pelavin Fine Art, July, 2001

"These are straight ahead landscapes with a modernist spine. If the landscape genre isolates them from the current Neo-Expressionist mainstream, they are also likely to outlast it."

— Stephen Westfall, Art in America, 1984