JOHN PERCEVAL

Corporate collection, Sydney

Two aspects of the work of John Perceval, Zwemmer Gallery, London, March 1964, cat. No. 11
John Perceval" ceramic sculpture and paintings, South Yarra Gallery, Melbourne, from 21 July 1964, cat. No. 4
Paintings by John Perceval, David Jones' Art Gallery, Sydney, 28 May - 9 June 1973, cat. No. 20

Overall good original condition. Some minor but stable crazing through heavy impasto sections. Slight surface dirt consistent with the age of the work. No visable retouchings.
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When John Perceval and his young family arrived in London in early 1963, Britain was in the grip of the most severe winter in almost a hundred years.  As Mary Perceval was to recall, 'every growing thing was frozen black... the landscape looked as though it would never come alive again.'¹   Struck by the dramatic transformation wrought by the northern hemisphere spring, with its explosion of life and colour, Perceval embarked on a series of landscape paintings which he would eventually exhibit under the title of 'The Seasons.'  These works are joyful, plein-air explorations of London's public parks, heaths and woods, and of the family's own Highgate garden.  They are an equally joyful exploration of the medium of oil on canvas, 'vivid bursts of pure paint squeezed from the tube in gobs and slugs and festoons, stirred with a finger or a straw brush, whirled, dashed, extruded...'²

The divided and repetitive brush stroke has invited comparisons with late Monet, early Kandinsky, even Tintoretto, but the particular inflection is uniquely Perceval's.  It is possible that, as Traudi Allen has suggested, the de-spatialising tendency, the bringing forward of the picture plane, has something to do with the experience of pottery decoration, 'a desire to direct the viewer's eye around the piece with the contradiction that it is also led into it.'³   It is likely that the London experience of viewing at first hand the works of impressionist and post-impressionist painters, particularly Vincent van Gogh, also contributed to the works' broken, choppy superficiality.

Moreover, the kaleidoscopically-coloured and thickly-impasted surface is in some ways a reflection of or reaction to the artist's admitted agoraphobia, his psychological and intellectual antipathy to 'that sort of Boyd and Nolan country, brown with big skies.'⁴   Rather than lean, Australian bush battlers standing in exposed silhouette, Perceval depicts his own boisterous children described in fugitive touches of flesh and hair, all within a swirling, flickering, abstract field of emerald and peacock, of long grass and 'hands' of chestnut leaves and bright blue sky. 

Here Perceval's family 'have sunk into their surroundings rather like those nineteenth century trick drawings in which one had to discover a number of dogs or devils hidden in the shrubbery... Nature has wrapped herself around these figures and claimed them as her own.  Their flesh is already metamorphosed into leaves and grass... There is nothing of the momento [sic] mori in Perceval's metamorphoses; they are not reminders of inevitable dissolution so much as symbols of the unity of all things... Each time a figure is absorbed into a landscape the paint leaps and coruscates in Dionysian revelry and colours roll about in paroxysms of laughter.  There is sunshine, a stirring wind and a minimum of shadows.'⁵

The early 1960s were a liberating and triumphant time for Australian artists working in England.  Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, Charles Blackman, Lawrence Daws and Louis James all achieved particular personal summits in their painting while living in London.  For Perceval it was the achievement of a balance between his narrative impulse, his old Bruegelesque figurative style, and 'a kind of action painting controlled by visual intuitions.'⁶   In his important 1967 Art and Australia article on the artist, John Reed wrote of this creative and productive peak in terms which well describe the present work:

'During the last six or seven years... we have found a steadily heightening lyrical intensity, achieved through a remarkable sense of the penetration of the artist right into the heart of his landscape, so that one does not view so much as an external thing but rather as though one was enmeshed in its very essence.  In the process of achieving this, Perceval's painting has become more and more abstract, so that finally the landscape becomes concentrated in a pulsating sensation of vibrant light and colour.  Leaves, branches, tree-trunk, grass, the sky, rain, even people and above all the sun and its light, all sing together in one magnificent lyric poem...'⁷

1.  Quoted in "A family scores in the matter of exhibits", Sun-Herald, 8 March 1964, p. XXX
2.  Roger Aldridge, "Picture of the artist in the wheatfield", The Age, 18 November 1972, p. XXX
3.  Traudi Allen, JohnPerceval, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1992, p. 111
4.  The artist, quoted in Aldridge, op. cit.
5.  James Gleeson, "Flesh or flower: they're all paint to Perceval", Sun-Herald, 28 November 1971, p. XXX
6.  Bernard Smith, "John Perceval", in John Perceval Canberra Exhibition, Canberra: Department of the Interior, 1966
7.  John Reed, "John Perceval", Art and Australia, vol. XXX no. XXX, June, 1967, p. 361