Peter Booth

Last updated

Peter Booth
Born (1940-11-02) 2 November 1940 (age 83)
Nationality Australian
Educationin the National Gallery School, Melbourne
Known for Painting

Peter Booth (born 2 November 1940) is an Australian figurative and a surrealist painter, and one of the key late-20th-century Australian artists. His work is characterised by an intense emotional power of often dark narratives, and esoteric symbolism.

Contents

Life

Booth was born the son of a doctor of metallurgy, and the industrial surrounds of Sheffield and its history of being bombed in the Second World War influenced him from an early age. He and his family migrated to Australia in 1958, where he worked as a labourer for several years before attending the National Gallery School in Melbourne. After making his reputation as an abstract painter, in the 1980s he turned to figuration, often that of horrifying dreams and nightmares. [1] The evocative power of some paintings allows viewers to almost feel the emotions of the central figure. This resonates with the artist's dream-based works, as many are inspired by his own dreamscapes. The connection to the subconscious further strengthens the argument for categorizing him as a surrealist painter.

Work

Booth's subject matter largely concerns the Australian landscape, both urban and rural, and the relationship between environment and individual. The individual's capacity to create and destroy is another theme, along with visions of the future of humanity.

His figuration works have tended to be horrifying and surreal, exploring the half remembered world of dreams. Such dreams do not come out of nowhere, but reflect on primal feeling buried in consciousness.

Booth's landscapes are charged with emotion and symbolic meaning. Memories of his childhood in the blackened industrial landscape of Sheffield seem to infuse the work, especially his well-known apocalyptic figurative paintings, which resemble images of the end of the world. These images contain an intense image of anxiety and dread, evoking the aftermath of some terrible destruction, vividly pictured in menacing forms with agitated and heavily applied brushstrokes.

An example of this is Painting 1978 which has been described as challenging and disturbing the viewer by the artist's choice of colour and method of painting.[ according to whom? ] "The dramatic black and red, yellow and white composition suggests both an industrial and a natural wasteland".[ citation needed ] The heavy impasto paint texture describes, with vigour and intensity, flames, explosions, and unidentified nightmarish images. Contradictory forces pull us into the central inferno below the glacial mountain peaks, and showers of rock explode towards us.

Is it the artist himself who stands with his back to us, mesmerised by the scene, while grotesque metamorphosing figures stare out at us?" [2] Peter Booth has centred many of his paintings around his childhood in Sheffield England where he grew up during the war years and their aftermath.

A major retrospective exhibition of Peter Booth's work was held at the Ian Potter Centre: National Gallery of Victoria during November 2003 to February 2004.

A retrospective exhibition displaying the evolution of themes in Booth's career is being held at the TarraWarra Museum of Art until 13 March 2023. [3] It includes several comparison prints with artists such as William Blake, Francisco Goya, James Ensor and Samuel Palmer to reveal similarities with Booth's work.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of painting</span> Historical development of painting

The history of painting reaches back in time to artifacts and artwork created by pre-historic artists, and spans all cultures. It represents a continuous, though periodically disrupted, tradition from Antiquity. Across cultures, continents, and millennia, the history of painting consists of an ongoing river of creativity that continues into the 21st century. Until the early 20th century it relied primarily on representational, religious and classical motifs, after which time more purely abstract and conceptual approaches gained favor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Max Ernst</span> German artist (1891–1976)

Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of textured objects and relief surfaces to create images—and grattage, an analogous technique in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. Ernst is noted for his unconventional drawing methods as well as for creating novels and pamphlets using the method of collages. He served as a soldier for four years during World War I, and this experience left him shocked, traumatised and critical of the modern world. During World War II he was designated an "undesirable foreigner" while living in France.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Australian art</span> Art made by Australians or in Australia

Australian art is a broad spectrum of art created in or about Australia, or by Australians overseas, spanning from prehistoric times to the present day. The art forms include, but are not limited to, Aboriginal, Colonial, Landscape, Atelier, and Contemporary art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Willem de Kooning</span> Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist (1904–1997)

Willem de Kooning was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. Born in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, he moved to the United States in 1926, becoming a US citizen in 1962. In 1943, he married painter Elaine Fried.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Tooker</span> American painter from New York City (1920–2011)

George Clair Tooker, Jr. was an American figurative painter. His works are associated with Magic realism, Social realism, Photorealism, and Surrealism. His subjects are depicted naturally as in a photograph, but the images use flat tones, an ambiguous perspective, and alarming juxtapositions to suggest an imagined or dreamed reality. He did not agree with the association of his work with Magic realism or Surrealism, as he said, "I am after painting reality impressed on the mind so hard that it returns as a dream, but I am not after painting dreams as such, or fantasy." In 1968, he was elected to the National Academy of Design and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Tooker was one of nine recipients of the National Medal of Arts in 2007.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arthur Boyd</span> Australian painter (1920–1999)

Arthur Merric Bloomfield Boyd was a leading Australian painter of the middle to late 20th century. Boyd's work ranges from impressionist renderings of Australian landscape to starkly expressionist figuration, and many canvases feature both. Several famous works set Biblical stories against the Australian landscape, such as The Expulsion (1947–48), now at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Having a strong social conscience, Boyd's work deals with humanitarian issues and universal themes of love, loss and shame.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adolph Gottlieb</span> American abstract expressionist painter, sculptor and printmaker

Adolph Gottlieb was an American abstract expressionist painter who also made sculpture and became a print maker.

James Timothy Gleeson was an Australian artist. He served on the board of the National Gallery of Australia.

Euan Ernest Richard Uglow was a British painter. He is best known for his nude and still life paintings, such as German Girl and Skull.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Scott (artist)</span> British artist (1913–1989)

William Scott was a prominent abstract painter from Northern Ireland, known for his themes of still life, landscape and female nudes. He is the most internationally celebrated of 20th-century Ulster painters. His early life was the subject of the film Every Picture Tells a Story, made by his son James Scott.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Western painting</span> Art produced in the Western world

The history of Western painting represents a continuous, though disrupted, tradition from antiquity until the present time. Until the mid-19th century it was primarily concerned with representational and traditional modes of production, after which time more modern, abstract and conceptual forms gained favor.

Roger Edward Kuntz was a highly accomplished Southern California landscape painter and a member of the Claremont Group of painters - professors and graduates of Pomona College, Scripps College, and the Claremont Graduate School. A figurative artist with an eye for abstract form, he won critical acclaim for striking compositions that transform an unusual array of subjects, including tennis players, domestic interiors, freeways, road signs, bathtubs and the Goodyear Blimp. A retrospective exhibition of his work, at the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, CA in 2009, was aptly titled "Roger Kuntz: The Shadow Between Representation and Abstraction". In the exhibition catalogue, curator Susan M. Anderson wrote: "Kuntz's work of the late 1950s and early 1960s quintessentially embodied the experimentation, fragmentation, and paradox in American culture of the time."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Irving Kriesberg</span> American painter, sculptor, educator, author, and filmmaker

Irving Kriesberg was an American painter, sculptor, educator, author, and filmmaker, whose work combined elements of Abstract Expressionism with representational human, animal, and humanoid forms. Because Kriesberg blended formalist elements with figurative forms he is often considered to be a Figurative Expressionist.

Karl Otto Götz often simply called K.O. Götz, was a German artist, filmmaker, draughtsman, printmaker, writer and professor of art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He was one of the oldest living and active artists older than 100 years of age and is best remembered for his explosive and complex abstract forms. His powerful, surrealist-inspired works earned him international recognition in exhibitions like documenta II in 1959. Götz never confined himself to one specific style or artistic field. He also explored generated abstract forms through television art. Götz is one of the most important members of the German Art Informel movement. His works and teachings influenced future artists such as Sigmar Polke, Nam June Paik and Gerhard Richter. He lived in Wolfenacker from 1975 until his death.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">20th-century Western painting</span> Art in the Western world during the 20th century

20th-century Western painting begins with the heritage of late-19th-century painters Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others who were essential for the development of modern art. At the beginning of the 20th century, Henri Matisse and several other young artists including the pre-cubist Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy and Maurice de Vlaminck, revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism. Matisse's second version of The Dance signified a key point in his career and in the development of modern painting. It reflected Matisse's incipient fascination with primitive art: the intense warm color of the figures against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of the dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bjarne Rise</span> Norwegian painter

Bjarne Rise was a Norwegian painter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean Bellette</span> Australian artist (1908–1991)

Jean Bellette was an Australian artist. Born in Tasmania, she was educated in Hobart and at Julian Ashton's art school in Sydney, where one of her teachers was Thea Proctor. In London she studied under painters Bernard Meninsky and Mark Gertler.

Jennifer Watson is an Australian artist known for her paintings that combine text and images.

<i>The Squatters Daughter</i> (Lambert) Painting by George W. Lambert

The Squatter's Daughter is a 1924 painting by Australian artist George Washington Lambert. It is part of the collection of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ichiro Fukuzawa</span> Japanese modernist painter

Ichiro Fukuzawa was a Japanese modernist painter credited with the establishment of Surrealism in Japan's artistic communities during the early 1930s.

References

  1. McDonald, John (2 March 2023). "Peter Booth's breathtaking new show really is the stuff of nightmares" . Brisbane Times. Nine Entertainment. Retrieved 9 March 2023.
  2. http://www.nga.gov.au/Federation/Detail.cfm?WorkID=60888 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
  3. Tarrawarra Museum of Art. "Peter Booth". Tarrawarra Museum of Art. Retrieved 9 March 2023.