“When I came to Australia from New Zealand at the age of ten we sailed into Sydney Harbour on a clear spring morning on the P&O ship Orsova, houses and skyscrapers blanketing the hills in the distance. In those first weeks I can vividly remember the city and suburbs under perfect blue skies, a crystalline light, sharp and warm, the buildings and houses and roads and white sandy beaches glowing in the sunshine. There’s photographs of me and my mother and father together all wearing sunglasses or me squinting into the camera with the sun behind the photographer. Seeing things for the first time, making a life in a new country left an imprint in my mind of the differences between Auckland and Sydney. The heat and sounds of a big city, bird life and the look and colour of the tress, deco and newly built 60’s red brick apartments and houses, tiled roofs, baking in the sun, windows with blinds drawn like eyelids. From light there comes shadows.
I’ve always been a keen drawer and might have gone to art school but music took a hold. I spent many years on the road with Mental As Anything and always had a drawing book with me. By the late 80’s I was painting too, scenes from the windows of cars and motels, along with interiors and objects. Shadows were always an important element of the subjects and compositions – punctuations to what we see, ever changing, shifting, enlarging, contracting, adapting, appearing and disappearing according to the light, the time of day. They create an inner life of an object and fill the void.
In my work I look for details, aspects, sections, slivers, focal points within the picture plane. Shadows set a mood, whether transforming the colours of the MacDonnell Ranges or a floor beneath a chair, simultaneously monumental and subtle, concrete and ghostly, sometimes working as abstract companions to interiors – chairs, sinks, egg cartons; exteriors – house and apartment facades, roads and industrial sites.”
– Peter O’Doherty, 2024
