14.05.24 - 08.06.24

Peter Westwood: The new way to live

Peter Westwood is an artist, curator, arts writer, and academic. His work is focused on ideas of unsettled and uncertain times. Peter has worked in various media however his practice is primarily formed through a long-standing preoccupation and interest in painting.

In the title of Peter Westwood’s latest exhibition, we find a clue. The new way to live suggests that an alteration or schism in the way we approach the world has occurred. The old ways have receded, a fresh way to live is required, but how do we recognise it? How do we grasp its form? In an era of uncertainty – a heating planet, wars, economic displacement, rising global intolerances – in a world, we increasingly experience as fleeting and fragmentary, Westwood proposes a survival strategy of radical momentariness, where each fragment, each encounter can be experienced as a totalising instance. Something inexplicable glistens on a flat blue background, two miniature arched rainbows hover in tandem, a nighttime garden has plants with branches and roots that cross over each other with lines sharp as knives, abstract patterns tumble down from ceilings, and shapes we feel we should be able to recognise recede into multi-coloured backgrounds.

The new way to live puts forward the idea that to be in the contemporary world is to experience life as an accumulation of fragmentary moments, both ubiquitous and peculiar. Rather than seeking a structure within this tumult we could, Westwood’s painting suggests, accept the chaotic moments as a sequence of equivalences where what matters is not a rationale, but an immersion.

Westwood has been included in group and individual exhibitions in public and commercial galleries in Australia and overseas. He has also curated exhibition projects for the past 30 years in Australia, and periodically overseas, and is represented by Blockprojects Gallery in Narrm/Melbourne, Australia, and Boutwell Schabrowsky Gallery in Munich, Germany.

in conversation: Peter Westwood & BLockprojects

Tell us about yourself.

I was born in Sydney (on the lands of the Gadigal people) eventually moving to country Victoria (to the lands of the Wadawurrung people), and finally then to Melbourne/Narrm in the early 1980s to study at the School of Art at RMIT University.

From a very young age, I had thought that I would become an artist as I was captivated by drawing and painting. This was partly due to having had an artist in my family, an uncle who was relatively successful during the 1960s and 70s. But my childhood in the country was also marked by instability, and I guess that this was another reason that I became an artist. As a child, drawing and painting seemed to be a way of making sense of a confusing adult world and an unpredictable household. Creativity not only formed a space of solitude and interiority for me, but in retreating to my bedroom to draw, I was able to make sense of, and intuitively express feelings about the world I lived in.

Making art has remained a primary way for me of understanding and clarifying the eccentricities of our human condition. In the main, my artworks are formed entirely through experiences where I channel my feelings and thoughts around what I consider to be a complex and ambiguous, but deeply engaging world.

I have taught in various art schools, and in my teaching, my principal method has been to encourage students to make contact with their feelings and to employ conscious and unconscious workings as a primary method of creative production. Of course, a capacity for skills, analysis, understanding, and knowledge are also primary factors for young artists to develop.

But what I discovered early in my life is that the thing about painting is that it has the capacity to bring ‘the world’ into an intimate space. In painting ‘the world’ artists can represent life as a sensual experience, freed from the manoeuvrings of our day-to-day interpretations and understanding.

I’ve also encouraged our three children, by some means, to trust their intuition because sometimes we feel things within our bodies before we are even aware of what it is that we are thinking. In working with these art forms I’m often surprised by my bodily response to colour and the materiality of a medium, even prior to ideas eventually revealing themselves, unfolding as thoughts about ‘the world’.

What process/method are you exploring /experimenting with at the moment?

No matter what the medium (painting, printmaking, drawing, video), I approach every new work as a unique experience, and in essence, I discover the content of a work by making it.

My processes and methods have always involved working from a random photograph that I’ve taken, towards a painting, print or drawing. The final artworks bear very little resemblance to the original source material.

Having finished a series of large- and small-scale paintings, I am currently working on a series of 7 screen prints (each as an edition of 6, and an artist proof). The prints range from three to eight colours, forming imageries that capture something of the atmosphere of our current times.

The prints will be presented initially at Blockprojects before being sent to Munich, Germany. In Munich, they will form part of a two-person exhibition with Julia Powles in June 2024. The exhibition is titled ‘What we feel and what we know’ and the work will be shown at Verein für Original-Radierung. The prints will also be exhibited with drawings at Boutwell Schabrowsky Gallery in Munich.

How do these processes/methods inspire your themes, concepts & ideas?

Returning to screen-printing after many years has been an enjoyable reacquaintance. Screen printing was invented around 1900 for the advertising industry, and in the mid to late 20C, it was adopted by many British and American Pop artists.

Therefore, as a medium, it leans naturally into more graphic imagery, and it’s this aspect that has been fun to work with. As my work builds via an interpretation of a photograph (a snapshot) it feels curious for me to work with a type of visual artefact that comes from the world (the photograph) while reworking the image as an unconscious response to my associations and feelings about the image. Its highly graphic, but the result is very intuitive.

In making screen prints, I’ve felt that this notion of devising imageries that evoke something that we know or feel that we recognise but also don’t really know comes very much to the forefront.