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Peter O'Doherty is emerging as one of Australia's most interesting contemporary figurative painters. His bright, geometric paintings depicting parts of 1960s' fibro houses, vinyl chairs and roadsides are syncopated by an emphasis on shadow and light. O'Doherty uses the bold meeting between sunlight and human-made surfaces to define compositional boundaries. Light and shadow are further played out in an exaggerated palette, which has the curious dual effect of inviting a sense of warm association and also of flattening and isolating the surface, almost like a memory from childhood. O'Doherty's images are stripped of the signs and paraphernalia of human use- no objects are visible through the closed windows, the vinyl chairs are empty and in vacant rooms and the streets are deserted. While this concentrates O'Doherty's formal exploration of light, colour and form it also raises several sub-texts: the place of humanity in a rapidly developing, monomorphic suburban environment; the representation of memory; and the aesthetics of simple, everyday objects. These vernacular subjects are aspects of a larger landscape, in which we figure by default. By removing obvious human context, O'Doherty frees the viewer to imagine, associate and wonder about the lives that have been immersed within these spaces; and about their absence. The simplicity and rhythmic consistency of his paintings provides an almost meditative reference point for us to see the places around us. Sydney Morning Herald Art Critic Sebastian Smee says of Peter's work: There is a mysterious sameness about each painting because O'Doherty distils each scene down to the bare essentials of form and colour. His images are flattened, so that shadows, for instance, become crucial elements in the overall composition of each work and his light is mostly a heightened, near-artificial, late-in-the-day drenching that creates simple shadows and saturated colours. Many of these works resemble a close up photograph carefully cropped so as to remove extraneous detail. When they work best, they have strong connections with geometric abstraction. Peter O’Doherty has exhibited widely both in Australia and overseas. In December 2005, Peter was awarded the Paddington Art Prize for best Australian landscape painting. Over the last 9 years Peter has been selected 7 times for the Salon des Refuses exhibition at the SH Ervin Gallery, Sydney and in 2001, he was selected for the Sulman Prize at the AGNSW. He is represented in collections both nationally and internationally. For two decades Peter O’Doherty was prominent musically as former bass player with the band ‘Mental As Anything’ along with his brother Reg Mombassa. They now have the band ‘Dog Trumpet’. Exhibitions 2006 Reproductions & Publications Sydney Morning Herald, March 2001 |
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 Blue Cushion (2005) Acrylic on canvas, 112cm x 112cm |
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