This has always come easily to Peter – and therefore he has tended to avoid it… what comes easily being suspect to the Protestant-raised mind!
The exception was when he was in the 5th and 6th forms and did about 50 oil paintings as an outlet for his severely cramped right brain. A fond and nostalgic memory of that period for Peter is of when the Girls High art teacher saw the paintings, bought one, and organised an exhibition at the Denby Gold club building, a grand old wooden place with undulating polished wooden floors. But that was the end of it; Peter went to art school in Christchurch, dropped out after six weeks and returned to Whangarei and home, to seek the answers to ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’…
For his Christian years (1972-81 approximately) he almost gave art up entirely as a sinful frivolity when the rest of the world was going to hell in a handbasket and needed saving…
Now, almost fifty years later, he has braced himself for a wholehearted return to the previously suspect thing, and is framing, stretching and painting large canvases in his large gallery space in dreamspace, Gisborne, letting himself go with the intuitive visionary naive symbolist art which comes most naturally to him and harmonises with his philosophical and narrative productions. ‘Of all treasure pits, one’s own is the last to be digged’ (Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra)
