PETER NEILSON Staring Into the Middle Distance

Exhibition Dates: 25 June - 14 July 2019 35 Derby Street Collingwood VIC 3066 Open 7 days 10am to 6pm

 MEDIA RELEASE

Twelve months after exhibiting a table full of small, abstract, Pretty Delicate cardboard and paper sculptures in 2018, Peter Neilson will exhibit a series of charcoal and chalk landscape drawings from country and city.

To the range of mediums and variation of subjects he employs in his oeuvre, Neilson says: “I sculpt for reasons other than I draw and I draw and sculpt for reasons other than I paint.The lack of an ‘obvious’ relationship between my art arising out of, and within, the different mediums, its heterogeneity, is an insistence on the singular, the individual, the hand made; in other words, an insistence on the individual mark in a world of diminishing possible futures, imposed by predictive analogues, and, therefore, a subjugation of individuality by stealth. One of the influences I hold high is Walt Whitman, the great Nineteenth Century American poet when he writes:

Do I contradict myself? Very well,
then I contradict myself, I am
large, I contain multitudes.”
From Song of Myself by Walt Whitman, 1855.

Of the landscape drawings, Neilson says: “I have been visiting a particular and particularly beautiful part of the Gippsland Lakes district for the past twenty years but it’s only over the last four years or so, having gotten to experience it beyond the sketch form, that I felt I could attempt an art that was more than making ‘another picture of another particularly beautiful piece of landscape’. I mean, the world’s got enough of them.

In trying to find a way into ‘landscape’ drawing, I discovered that, for me, the attempt was not to make a faithful ‘root and branch’ recording of what was presented, it was to make ‘a drawing’. That is, not just a ‘record of place’ in front of the artist but was built in sympathy with the “agreeable constraint” of the art materials brought on to the work-site.

There is also something mysterious and vast about making art in the ancient wind and the weather with the easel having to be tied to the fence post for fear of it being blown away, or the sunny and languorous and able to return to the place easy and slow for days; or the deciduous, foggy, bare, and barely moving days of the autumn/winter months.

All good, all beautiful, whatever the outcome.

“The drawings from the city,” Neilson says, “came about after many years of walking, driving and riding bikes past scenes that “purred their way into my heart”. A couple of the inner-city drawings are of sacred sites of the café latte/ chardonnay drinking elites, a proudly-worn attempted disrespect given to us by no less than our then creaky, old-before-his-time leader, John Howard. Waiter! Another bottle!”

Staring Into the Middle Distance is current until 14 July 2019.
For more details or images contact: media@australiangalleries.com.au australiangalleries.com.au
03 9417 2422
AUSTRALIAN GALLERIES M E L B O U R N E