Opening Speech, Colville Gallery 17 June 2011
Jock Young


Good evening and welcome to this exhibition of Peter Gouldthorpe's paintings. Tonight I would like to talk about two facets of Peters work. There are others: the many award winning children's books he has illustrated, and the tromp l'oilles he has painted here and overseas. Tonight I will talk about the inside and outside of peter's painting.
The first point I wanted to cover is the outside - his outdoor or plein air painting. These are paintings made in front of or in the landscape. This in my opinion is where the craft of landscape painting is best learnt. Many of us fail in the pursuit and it is possibly why it sometimes gets misconstrued as the work of hobbyists. All the myriad combinations of line, colour and form are exposed. It can be maddening as just as you think you are on top of things the light will fade, the sun will come out, change in direction or it might rain. Patience is required and a certain license. In the end though it can be very rewarding, much like a fishing trip but where the catch is a good painting or at least the makings of one. I painted side by side with Peter on a very windy day on Flinders Island. My painting for a time was going quite well but one of those myriad decisions went wrong and I was suddenly floundering. Peter persevered and "Towards Deal – weather to try a painters patience" was the result.
Plein air is a passion I have shared with Peter, Steve Lees and the late great Greg Hinds for many years. For Peter and I, this goes back to when we were teenagers growing up in Sydney - we would search out places around Barrenjoey or Kuringai Chase, or trips further afield to Wisemans ferry in Peter's Cortina. Nowadays, Tasmanian places like Goats Bluff, Bruny Island, New Norfolk or spot x are the destination. I recognize a number of the paintings here that come from expeditions we have shared. The mountain paintings, as you can see, are very much Peter's own territory. There is a sensitivity of approach here that can only come from someone who has immersed themselves in this landscape. But perhaps these are studies for the real thing which is the second point I will discuss, and that is the inside or studio work.
The Inside
In trying to place Peters work a problem arises. Firstly, as he told me, he has the right of reply. But that's not it. He does not fit a particular movement or ideology, at least not in his paintings. I cannot immediately place him in a lineage as I might some other artist. As an example, the Victorian painter Jeff Makin proudly asserts his connection with Fred Williams, or perhaps Brett Whitely who saw himself connected by what he termed a golden thread to Lloyd Rees.
Peter is somewhat unique. If I had to place him anywhere it would be with realist painting although I am still not comfortable with that tag. I keep thinking that his closest connection would be to the luminists of mid nineteenth century American landscape painting and perhaps Jackson Pollock but I will come back to try and justify that last comparison.
First the luminists. These painters, names like Church and Bierstadt, were known for their vast panoramas, vivid sunsets and dramatic lighting – they painted the aha moment of a place where for a fleeting time when the light was just right, the world takes on an otherness that at other times is quite ordinary and unnoticed. They made many journeys into wilderness America to record the drama of these untouched places. Maybe Piguenit and Gruener are the Australian equivalents of these wilderness explorers.
Much of Australian contemporary art, even wilderness art, is as much about the mind as about the place so I struggle to find a contemporary comparison although the Melbourne painter William delafield Cook comes close. You might know him for his detailed paintings of haystacks. They both have in common the idea of the painter as recorder. As Cook observed "It's that self-conscious desire to somehow record moments in your history, places you have been to, things that have attracted your interest, as a record of a kind. Peter has often remarked of this idea of the artist as recorder.
But back to the wilderness. This is where Peter goes to and where he excels. His paintings and drawings from places such as the Walls of Jeruselam, Mt Field, Cradle Mountain and the rainforests they shelter show for me at least, a search for those special moments when these places come alive.
In particular, I am intrigued by his interiors of Tasmanian rainforest and what seems to be developing as some kind of unconscious series. There are paintings from previous years where these places are beginning to appear. The painting "Gondwanaland Rococo" was not the first of these paintings, but it won him the people's choice at the 2010 glover prize. This painting and its title spoke volumes where Peter is going with his work. The elaborate detail of the trees, ferns, moss and lichen are like a condensed taxonomy of the rainforest.
The painting as you enter the gallery, "Tracked Wilderness", is constructed with a similarly elaborate architecture. There is a rhythmic repetition that underlies the tightly observed taxonomy. The lighted leaves and overlapping branches in the foreground are repeated into the picture setting up a kind of fractal complexity. Hence my earlier reference to Jackson Pollock and his drip paintings in which he was credited in using this patterning instinctively. Then there is the slash of red cut into the trees that give it an uncomfortable sense of contemporary fragility. This theme is also apparent in similar works such as "Lost" to my left? Or "A thousand years in the making" that they cannot be taken for granted or we will continue to lose them.
I will finish by congratulating Peter on this excellent exhibition and hope you enjoy the show as much as I do.
Jock Young Hobart 17 June 2011

Bantick, Chris Picture of the Past Between the Lines Sunday Tasmanian 10 December, 2006 p 6

Queenie: One Elephant's Story by Corinne Fenton, illustrated by Peter Gouldthorpe, Black Dog, $24.95

Peter Gouldthorpe id one of Tasmania 's most noted picture book illustrators and artists

His murals are found in North Hobart and South Hobart and his landscapes are sought after. Earlier this month, the illustrations for his latest book, Queenie: One Elephant's Story , were on display at Fullers Bookshop.

The book tells the story of Queenie, the fabled Indian elephant at the Melbourne Zoo. Noted as a docile and benign animal, Queenie provided rides, sometimes up to 500 a day, for children right through the 1930s and into the '40s.

This changed when, one day in 1944, Queenie crushed her keeper. In July 1945, Queenie was destroyed.

The book explores Queenie's life and yet leaves open-ended whether Queenie behaved out of character through overwork, tiredness or mistreatment.

Gouldthorpe said working with the book's author, Melbourne 's Corinne Fenton, provided its own challenges.

"I did not really work all that closely with the author, but Corinne had done a huge amount of work in the state archives in North Melbourne . She was really thorogh.

"I rode on her back as she'd done the research. I asked her which photographs and images I wanted as references. She already had them."

While the story of Queenie can be authenticated from archival material, one of the problems facing Gouldthorpe as the illustrator was to capture the actual story events truthfully.

Gouldthorpe said there wasn't a record of Queenie's complete life.

"I used a little bit of licence about how they caught the elephant. Getting her on the boat with a sling in the air was the usual method. A bull elephant was necessary to get her on the truck.

"Still, what we tried to do was keep exactly to the actual events. My father actually remembers riding on Queenie as a kid. There are many people who remember Queenie and it is an era that is still relatively recent."

To capture the events of the past, Gouldthorpe used extensive photographs and not his imagination.

While the pursuit of accuracy was paramount, he said he was uneasy about this.

"That was really scary. I was still nervous that someone will

Come and sue me or claim copyright. I worked from photos a lot and in fact photos were the inspiration for the style of illustrations.

"I wanted them to look like sepia photographs which had been hand coloured. I have recomposed them. I added things to some to get the content I wanted. Initially, I thought of the pictures as a collection of album photographs."

The moment when Queenie crushes the keeper is suggested. While this is a reflection of the accuracy the book has maintained, Gouldthorpe said even the representation of the identity of the keeper is open to conjecture.

"There is a photo of one of the keepers holding her foot. He is sitting on a park bench with Queenie's foot on is knee. I have tried to re-imagine that scene."

One image in the book shows boys in boaters teasing Queenie. Gouldthorpe is surprised when I mention to him that they are dressed in the colours of the exclusive Melbourne school, Scotch College .

It is purely an accident, he said. "That's all me. My mother said that boys didn't wear boaters back then, but there was an image with men in boaters. I wanted these little kids to be private school boys but there is no intention to single out a particular school. It was just the colour scheme."

The book, besides being a poingnant story for young children, is also a snapshot of social and visual history.

Gouldthorpe said Queenie was used as a marketing tool by the Melbourne Zoo. "There were advertisements in newspapers about her birthday party. That is for real. She even had a birthday cake. Some of that memorabilia is still around."

Andersch, Joerg Modern look at landscape The Mercury 26 November, 2005 p10

Tasmanian Landscapes
Colville Street Gallery, Battery Point
Price range; $650 to $5000

New on the Hobart art scene, the Colville Street Gallery is in the former Post Office building in Colville Street Battery Point.

Director Trudi Young's first major client is the well-known Tasmanian artist Peter Gouldthorpe, an award-winning illustrator and painter. Though the gallery's first show seems to follow a more traditional approach when inspected casually, neither Gouldthorpe nor other artists represented are followers of customary 'traditional' expression.

Gouldthorpe is a painter of contemporary interpretations of the landscape, working in a manner not unlike the analytic technique the legendary Max Meldrum taught almost a century ago at the Victorian Gallery School in Melbourne . Post-modernism offers present art practices the opportunity to re-examine style forays into past expressions, extracting many beautiful and worthwhile interpretations that were trampled by the historic avalanche of modernism

Andersch, Joerg Modern look at landscape The Mercury 26 November, 2005 p10

Tasmanian Landscapes
Colville Street Gallery, Battery Point
Price range; $650 to $5000

New on the Hobart art scene, the Colville Street Gallery is in the former Post Office building in Colville Street Battery Point.

Director Trudi Young's first major client is the well-known Tasmanian artist Peter Gouldthorpe, an award-winning illustrator and painter. Though the gallery's first show seems to follow a more traditional approach when inspected casually, neither Gouldthorpe nor other artists represented are followers of customary 'traditional' expression.

Gouldthorpe is a painter of contemporary interpretations of the landscape, working in a manner not unlike the analytic technique the legendary Max Meldrum taught almost a century ago at the Victorian Gallery School in Melbourne . Post-modernism offers present art practices the opportunity to re-examine style forays into past expressions, extracting many beautiful and worthwhile interpretations that were trampled by the historic avalanche of modernism