For the first time in eight years, Peter Siddell has a new exhibition. Not that he's been idle - he's been selling his work and earning praise from critics and public alike. How does he do it? "Painting has to become a habit, just like a job," he tells DENIS EDWARDS.

~Denis Edwards
Quote Unquote
August 1994

At the age of 10 or 11 on the morning paper round before school, Peter Siddell walked the empty twilight streets of suburban Auck land. Darkened houses slumbered in the last quiet moments of dawn. No people, no movement, no sound. Childhood impressions resonate in his paintings: in the eerie stillness of deserted cityscapes which leave the viewer with a heightened sense of expectation÷as the young Siddell might once have wondered what secrets lay beyond those silent, curtained windows. "Memory is an important component of my painting, particularly of childhood," he says. "But I had been painting for a long time before I thought much about my own experiences. It was only when my children were about the same age that I began to remember and to see those memories reflected." Siddell has been described as one of New Zealand's leading realist painters, but a distinctly subversive element loiters behind the facade of immaculate, inner-city villas and neatly ordered streets. In the catalogue for a solo exhibition of his paintings in Auckland last year, art historian Julie Roberts noted a asurrealist displacement" in Siddell's work, which she likened to a good thriller: "It's that psychological disruption concealed by apparent normality that maintains your interest." By the absence of a human presence, Siddell freezes a moment in time. But, unlike the doc umentary approach of a photographer, he both creates and manipulates the images portrayed. "I'm not particularly interested in painting things on a superficial level," he says. "A camera does that just as well.
"People call me a realist because there are elements in my work that appear to be recognisable. But the finished result is far from actuality. I really see painting as a creation of still images. Any sense of movement, anything that creates a narrative quality, detracts from that stillness." Cleansed of people, cars, power pylons and lampposts, Siddell's portraits of urban harmony glimmer with a cool perfection far removed from the sprawling tableau of his own child hood in working-class Grey Lynn . " Sagging roofs and peeling paint add qualities of quaintness and nostalgia which I don't really want in my work. " An idealist, then ? He laughs. "Every painter is an idealist." Art critics who have interpreted his paintings as a social commentary on the sterility of suburban life also fall wide of the mark. Auckland, says Siddell, is "a wonderful place to live" and he has spent most of his life in the thick of it. When he and his wife, the artist Sylvia Siddell, decided to move from Blockhouse Bay, they sat on the summit of Mount Eden and chose an area of bush near the foothills. The house they settled on, a rambling, 80-year-old villa, might have been lifted from one of his canvases. Inside, an impressive collection of New Zealand art covers the walls, including a num ber of portraits by Siddell which he describes as "family snapshots". (Emily, his younger daughter, is also a recognised artist working in glass.) From his studio upstairs, the view sweeps westward towards the Waitakere Ranges and the bush that often forms a back drop to his work. "I paint the world as I see it; the images I know and understand," he says. "There's no light without dark. There has to be contrast. All my work is a very personal statement. For me, good art is about communication. It's the ordering of your experiences." In the world of New Zealand art, Siddell, as they say in Hollywood, is bankable. Last year, all 23 paintings were presold at his solo exhibition, From The Isthmus, . Corporate commissions include a series of panels depicting Karekare Beach (on Auckland's west coast) for the Auckland Savings Bank and a painting of Wellington for the Governor-General, Dame Catherine Tizard, which hangs in Government House. The title of the blue-skied Wellington painting, Toward The Bombay Hills, illustrates both Siddell's wry sense of humour and his affinity with Auckland. At the unveiling ceremony in the capital city, he asked his audience to forgive the title because at least he'd managed to get the weather right. Siddell, who is now a grandfather and turns 60 this year, approaches life with a sense of adventure combined with the willingness to take risks. The son of a wharfie, he left school at the age of 16 to train as an electrician. Ten years later, there was a shortage of primary school teachers so he went along for an interview and was accepted. When he and Sylvia built their first house in Blockhouse Bay, they laid the concrete drive, made their own furniture and then went hunting for paintings to hang on the walls. "We didn't see anything we wanted," he says. ' So, like good do-it-yourself Kiwis, we bought a box of pastels and did some for ourselves." Back in the 1960s, when Siddell was still teaching, he would sit up in the attic painting late at night. A friend took one of his water colours to be framed and the gallery owner was so impressed he asked for two more paintings to include in a group show. Both of them sold. In 1972, Siddell took a six-month break from teaching to paint fulltime and, at the age of 37, held his first solo show. The exhibition sold out and he quit teaching for good. Despite his emphasis on urban landscapes, Siddell's vision has also been moulded by the New Zealand countryside÷from the mountain ranges he climbed as a younger man to summers spent at the family's Karekare bach. Sojourns in England and Europe only heightened his awareness of a distinct New Zealand identity. "We can no longer be called a British colony," he says. "I feel utterly foreign in England. Despite the obvious differences in language, I feel a great deal more at home in France. " Standing at his easel before a canvas in progress, Siddell paints to the stirring sounds of the classics Beethoven, Verdi or Puccini for the groundwork; Bach or Mozart as the images take shape. "When I'm painting, it's the work that drives me. Every brushstroke changes what happens next and I'm always impatient to see how each one will turn out. They always surprise me. But after a while you get used to the fact that you will never reach your ideals."

~ A group exhibition, The Persuasion Of The Real, featuring the work of both Peter and Sylvia Siddell, runs at the Hawke's Bay Art Museum in Napier until July 9, then tours the North Island.

~Joanna Wane
Pacific Way
June 1995

Everywhere in light and calm the murmuring
Shadow of departure; distance looks our way;
And none knows where he will lie down at night
CHARLES BRASCH, THE ISLANDS.

Peter Siddell has selected four sites for this exhibition- physical sites arising from
personal memories and recollections. They are also inventions the artist has created of his personal environment. He has adapted and altered the landscape adding new light and new shadows. They have the appearance of real time and real place but they are deceptions highlighting the artists ability to create new worlds and new narratives.
They are sites which mark out the social and historical life of New Zealand, four pointson a social compass. "Looking Out" is a view of the ideal city, of civilisation triumphant. "Gulf" puts that civilisation in a wider perspective encompassing spiritual dimension. "Point of Departure" notes the fragile hold that civilisation can have on the natural environment. "Separation" depicts the interface between civilisation and the worlds of natural history and mythology linking us to the land and to events and individuals in the past.
Siddell's paintings examine the balance between the natural environment and the civilised, between order and chaos and between the spiritual and the physical.
"Looking Out" refers back to the Renaissance and the paintings of Pierro della Francesca in which the artist imposed an order not only on the city but on the people who inhabited the spaces he created. "Looking Out" acknowledges the surrealism of Rene Magritte for both artists create a barrier between artist and viewer - a separation between the real and the illusory.
In "Separation" Siddell depicts the mythological history of Taranaki, records the volcanic history of the area - the destruction of the forests and the development of pastoralism and a new culture. Inside the nineteenth century building we can see paintings and photographs, books and papers. This the visual and written history, the memory of the past transformations of the land.
Siddell's exclusion of people from his works reinforces the notion that people are not important to history which prefers ideas, concepts and the broad brush. History selects the events and individuals we want to retain of the past. The past either the written, oral or mythological does not tell the truth. Our histories like memory are a means of making sense of our own self-centered worlds
His paintings examine the way in which society shapes its memories into a kind of collective shared memory. There is a recognition of the rupture between actual and invented traditions which lead to difference and dislocation in the fabrication of social identity.

John Daly-Peoples

"Peter Siddell is identified with his depictions of the central areas of Auckland in a hard edged realist style. While his works appear to be records of actual places, Siddell's painting has a subjective component. Memory, association and invention play roles in his compositions. He avoids figures and narrative to keep the stillness and super-real order of his imagery, which resonates at a subconscious level.His paintings seem to be beyond normal time and to have the timelessness of vivd memory."
Michael Dunn. Two hundred Years of New Zealand Painting.

"Nostalgia is also at the heart of Peter Siddell's immaculate representation of a city which looks like it might be Auckland but on closer inspection is revealed to be a scrambled simulacrum."
Roger Blackley. Two Centuries of New Zealand Landscape Art.

"Relocation in fact has long been central to Siddell's imagery. Here an almost Mount Roskill; But on that tangent, no: there,a clocktower,Ponsonby by shape not place: then was this not Devonport - but landlocked? Rearrangements these as encountered in the impeccable illogic of the dream."
Don Binney. Landscape Reassertions Art New Zealand 48

"The smallest of his panoramas, simply called Isthmus, is the most magical in its extended format and unusual lighting. It is a view across Auckland at the narrowest point of the country, from coast to coast. In this instance, Siddell has given up his customary detail for a more unified view that has an imaginative, compelling dimension to it."
Michael Dunn. As Far as the Eye can See. Art New Zealand 62.