Peter Cleverley: Between Transience And Eternity

Description

This beautiful, heavily illustrated book traces Peter Cleverley's formation and evolution as an artist, identifying the myriad influences that aroused in him a profound sense of the transience of human life and the paradoxical complexity of the human condition. The portrait that results shows how Cleverley's sense of the human condition has allowed him to convey it symbolically in a way that simultaneously captures not only the fragility of human life, but also its joys. His art communicates an appreciation of the beauty of this world and the gift of being alive, together with the value of art as a means of transcending mutability. Cleverley is a painter whose work is destined to be recognised for making an important contribution to the history of art in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Author description

Alistair Fox is a New Zealand scholar, former university administrator, and writer who specialises in English Tudor literature and history, New Zealand literature and cinema studies, contemporary literary and film theory, particularly with regard to national identity and the creative process. From 2019-2022, he has regularly written catalogue essays, most frequently for RDS Gallery, Dunedin, which he owned from 2020-2022. Despite his involvement in international scholarship, Alistair Fox has lived his whole life in the South Island of New Zealand, and has developed his career from his base in the University of Otago, where he taught several generations of students for 40 years. A keen tramper who loves the bush and mountains of Te Waipounamu, he has always been especially interested in the influence of the landscape on the New Zealand psyche, a theme that he has recently pursued in studies of art by Otago painters who have exhibited at RDS Gallery, which is now directed by his wife, Hilary Radner.

Table of contents

Acknowledgements 7

Introduction 9

An Artist is Formed 14

Origins 16

Inspirations and Training 24

Discovering the World: Overseas Travels 34

Becoming a Painter: The Return Home 42

Aesthetic Principles and Stylistic Practices 50

Paintings of Early and Mid-Career 60

Introduction 62

Kakanui and the Early Still-Life Paintings, 1979-88 64

Human Figures, 1986-92 72

'Heaven Is Here': Landscapes, 1994-2007 90

Off the Back of a Truck: Boxes and the Dog Animal, 2006-11 108

Dans la force de l'age 124

Introduction 126

Boat People and the Poor List 128

World Girls and Transnational Migration 138

Always There: Between Transience and Eternity 150

Conclusion 164

Exhibitions 166

Works Cited 168

Endnotes 170

Index 175