Walk down any suburban street in Sydney and you’re likely to see an indiscriminate mix of building styles – from McMansions to Californian bungalows, triple fronted brick veneers to simple weatherboard and fibro cottages. Add to this a multicultural peppering of Spanish colonial archways or faux Greek colonnades and your average residential street is likely to resemble a pluralistic melting pot of styles and periods. This incongruity has had its detractors.
Painter Peter O’Doherty seems to revel in this architectural jumble and likes to render in acrylic paint the eclectic variety of suburban homes that we all live in. He is drawn to the vernacular in architecture. Rather than capturing monumental or grandiose buildings in paint, he is a champion of the modest dwelling – unheroic and unnoticed. The artist wants to draw our attention to buildings, structures and objects that we would normally walk past without a second glance. By highlighting these features, he ascribes a certain beauty to them that we can all perceive – a 1960s red brick apartment block, a flat top car port or pebble pave driveway.
– Victoria Hynes, 2020 (catalogue essay)
