Nature is the subtle presence in John Peart’s mature work moving in rhythm with his long held interests in music, meditation, Indian spiritual life, and philosophy. During the late 60s and 70s he rapidly experimented with most modes of abstraction, making three-dimensional shaped works, pouring and staining the canvas, using stencils in colour-fields, and making all over calligraphic patterning. Later some of these works would provide grounds to be painted over or cut up and rearranged into oppositional squares of a grid. In 1990, when Roy Jackson suggested that John should combine all of these processes into one painting, he replied he had already done so.
[…]
Whatever pleasures we may discern in any one Peart painting, it is important to acknowledge his superior craft and philosophical focus, that was so perceptive in bringing the patterns in, and underlying nature, and human consciousness into art.
– Sioux Garside, 2024 [excerpt from catalogue essay]
