PETER BOOTH B. 1940

In his catalogue essay for the artist's recent major retrospective exhibition, Robert Lindsay writes: 'Peter Booth is an epic storyteller. His art records an odyssey powered by imagination and disciplined by four decades of painting and drawing. The imagery of his work, distanced from the immediate and the particular, gains ascent to wider universal reading by virtue of its power in addressing both the cultural chimeras of our mythic past and prophecies of the imagined future. Nurtured by literature and drawn from dreams and memory, ...Booth's dramatic and poetic images of the human spirit are framed within a world both observed and imagined'.(1)
Booth was born in Sheffield, in the north of England, and attended the Sheffield College of Art before emigrating to Australia with his family at the age of 17. He studied full-time at the National Gallery School in Melbourne 1962-65 under John Brack, 'an encouraging mentor in relation to the visual and literary arts'.(2) Booth first received widespread critical attention when his work was included in The Field, the highly-regarded contemporary abstract art exhibition for the opening of the new National Gallery building in 1968.
The emergence of figuration in Booth's art in the late 1970s can be seen as something of a turning point in Australian painting. Whilst his work from about 1977 to 1982 is dominated by 'apocalyptic' imagery, in the later 1980s he moves back and forth between figure and landscape. Interviewed in 1982 for the London exhibition Eureka! Australian Artists from Australia, Booth explained, 'I feel that my work has to speak for itself, and the viewer should be free to make his/her own interpretations'.(3) Also in 1982 he represented Australia, together with the late Rosalie Gascoigne, at the Venice Biennale. Rosalie Gascoigne had two of his works in her own collection and found his imagery marvellous rather than threatening: taking the viewer travelling 'with Gulliver, into places both Lilliputian and Brobdingnagian'.(4)
Through the decade of the '80s, as Ted Gott has observed, 'a wealth of works, distinctive for their startling and transcendent imagery, - burst from his mind and coursed down through his hand'.(5) In 1986 a large canvas entitled Desert was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art from Booth's successful one-person exhibition at the CDS Gallery in New York. The present Painting 1986 was purchased by the present owner from CDS the following year.
Painting 1986 is less darkly foreboding than many of Booth's compositions from earlier in the decade. The overall tonality and the strange, otherworldly life forms relate to those in his Painting 1984 (National Gallery of Victoria) which, for Jason Smith, 'typifies the kind of "packed" landscapes of abstracted and mutated forms, and references to the destructive and regenerative energy of fire'.(6) Scale is never certain. Just as Rosalie Gascoigne pondered in her poetic analogy with Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, these object-creatures envisioned by Booth may be microscopic - seen in close focus - or as colossal as the mythical inhabitants of Brobdingnag. In Painting 1986 there is an atmosphere of aftermath, of preceding untold cataclysm, and yet overall an optimistic sense of renewal. Vibrant colours, clear light and spontaneous energy in every brushstroke conjure the teeming diversity of life - be it real or imaginary.
In 1991 the National Gallery of Victoria gave Booth a 'Survey' exhibition and the NGV's recent comprehensive retrospective revealed a continuing oeuvre of truly astonishing power. Booth is now represented in all major Australian public collec