Peter Booth

The "dark edge" of Peter Booth’s apocalyptic paintings echoes the dark edge of the artist’s life and, indeed, of the world we live in.

“A lot of humans forget we are organic entities, the same as every other creature on the planet, and we’ve only been here for a short time. I am very pessimistic about the plight of human beings. We don’t learn much, I mean, we’ve been wreaking havoc as they did in the Middle Ages. We also have bigger weapons. One thing I am not pessimistic about is the ability of nature to heal itself.”

Peter Booth made this comment in a conversation we had in his sunny St. Kilda backyard in November 2003, a time before climate change was claiming front pages and news specials on the television. It was the eve of his massive retrospective at the Ian Potter Centre at the National Gallery of Victoria entitled Peter Booth: Human/Nature, which showcased 230 of his paintings and received rave reviews.

Talking to Booth seventeen years later, the artist simply says: “It’s just getting worse.”

It had always been easy to read Booth’s apocalyptic imagery as throwbacks to medieval times, an heir to the dark visions of Bosch and Breughel, a form of morbid surrealism. But seventeen years later, as we see seared animals crawl out of the charred remains of forests throughout Australia, Indonesia, and California, and as we watch the seas become waste-dumps of plastic, and as we witness the dark antics of the leaders of the Western world abuse their powers, one has to wonder just how prescient Mr. Booth has been.  

Booth was known as an abstractionist early in his career and his bold, black paintings were featured in The Field at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1968 – a show devoted to minimalist painting. Of course, this was a deceptive, simplistic reading of Booth’s work. If anything, those paintings were terrifyingly accurate. Physical depictions of deep nightmares of Stygian doorways to suffocating eternal blackness created mortal and moral black holes in gallery walls, sucking in the light. They were the extreme opposite of Booth’s peer (and friend) in The Field, Robert Hunter, whose complex, gridded patterns in white could have been read as portals into the afterlife. Booth and Hunter were the black and white of the time; equally powerful and neither, strictly speaking, minimalist abstractionists. Two nuggety blokes wrestling with the void.

Booth hasn’t changed a great deal over the years and still lusts after his cigars. In 2019 he carried off a blockbuster exhibition at Milani Gallery in Brisbane, which had viewers in awe. “It went well,” he says modestly. “They put us up at this beaut hotel on Brisbane’s Southbank called Emporium. The lift was amazing – the walls would light up with videos like a giant shark coming at you! The first time I got on the lift, a young fella I thought I recognised got in and I said; ‘Are you Ben Quilty?’ He said he was, and I introduced myself and he was extraordinarily flattering and came to see my show!”

Speaking to Booth while the bushfires still smoulder in some parts and hailstones the size of cricket balls hail down on others seems particularly apt. However, he points out that even his earliest work stems from childhood memories. “I grew up in Sheffield in England which was heavily bombed as the Germans were trying to close down the steel mills there. That’s where the early figurative subjects come from. My work has always had a dark edge, but so’s my life . . . I had two brothers who both committed suicide, so I think making art has acted as a form of therapy. It’s always either the figure or the landscape, but the desolation in them links them all.”

Desolate, yet bleakly beautiful – as his friend and fellow painter Gareth Sansom points out. “Peter Booth, nearing eighty, is Australia’s greatest living painter,” comments Sansom. “In 1968 in The Field exhibition . . . he displayed an uncanny understanding of what the curators were trying to do when he put together his minimal abstract painting, which remains – with Robert Hunter’s contribution – the highlight of that exhibition. But Booth was always a masterful academic draftsman, as his still life studies earlier proved when a student at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School (the Gallery School) with teacher John Brack; so his dramatic figurative moves at Pinacotheca Gallery in 1979 shouldn’t have surprised anyone. But they did – nightmare fantasies conducted in gloomy hellish night-scapes which were not for the faint-hearted.” 

“Fast-forward to Milani Gallery last June, which saw Booth at the peak of his powers with especially the two major paintings, Painting (brown road stones trees), 2007, and Painting (heads), 2018,” Sansom recalls. “Both these paintings have subtle menace slowly revealed; in other words, fraught with possibilities. He puts his paint down with a palette knife and he keeps it simple, avoiding the histrionic theatrics which so often lead showy younger artists astray. Booth reminds us that painting is not dead!”

Indeed, but that is no surprise. Even harking back to 1986, when Booth had his first New York solo show at the CDS Gallery, New York Times critic Michael Brenson stated, “Booth is a visionary artist obsessed with superstition, transformation and light. His work is a mixture of the apocalyptic Australia of On the Beach and the vast Australia that remains one of the last standing invitations to dream.”

The sense of the apocalyptic remains. Yet, even in 2020, Booth injects a flash of hope into the proceedings when, post-human, the occasional flash of verdant green nudges through the ash-stained snow.

Booth has always been prescient, but his latest works – with their angst-ridden refugees and blasted landscapes – seem, rather unfortunately, almost literal illustrations of our current news cycle. But Booth, chomping down on his inevitable Cuban cigar, simply quotes one of his favourite books, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, with the wry and fatalistic statement: “So it goes . . .”

This essay was originally published in Artist Profile, Issue 50, 2020.
Images courtesy the artist, Bonhams Australia, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Milani Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, TarraWarra Museum of Art, and University of Melbourne Art Collection.

EXHIBITION 
PETER BOOTH
26 November 2022 – 13 March 2023
TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria