A number of reasons made it feel appropriate for me to give this exhibition of paintings the title From a Distance.; While there is obvious attempt to create an illusion of spatial distance I am also concerned with the separation and distance of time. In his last TV interview Denis Potter spoke about nostalgia not being just sentimental wallowing but drawing on deep reserves to sustain a creative present. Like many artists I delve into memories of childhood experience.

           I thought that a few notes may assist as a guide to how I currently approach my work. However, they are not meant to be a definitive interpretation of my paintings as that must be made by each individual viewer. The painting Separation came about following a journey through the North Island of New Zealand. Travelling past the mountains of the central plateau with a glimpse of Mt Taranaki far to the west I recalled the story of how Taranaki and Tongariro had both loved Pihanga and how, after Tongariros triumph, Taranaki in anger had fled to the west with the course of the Whanganui river marking his path. In his separation Taranaki still weeps. 
 

           In the shadow of Ruapehu is Raetihi, once a thriving regional centre. Like many other small rural towns, there is now a real sense of separation from the rest of New Zealand. The ambitiously grand and solid buildings which once housed the post office, banks, theatre and municipal offices are now tea rooms and craft shops. The mountains of Tongariro National Park which I have represented in this painting are where I started tramping and climbing as a teenager. When I was a young man mountaineering was for many years the driving passion in my life. The mountains I have painted here are the remembered hills of my youth forever separated from me by the distance of time.

           The window in the painting Looking Out acts as both a pathway and a barrier to the recollected and reassembled architecture of my childhood - a place where I cannot go again - as is the landscape of Point of Departure; a remembrance of papa cliffs and mud flats and childhood hours playing on the fore shore of the Manakau Harbour. As a small boy I can remember Sunday afternoon visits to cemeteries when my mother, who owned a car would drive elderly friends after church to visit the graves of their loved ones. While the adults would do their grown up things my sister and I would play among the head stones. In the 1970s I painted a series of works from these memories. Twenty five years later I am using the same information from my original drawings and sketchbooks. 

           But the paintings are as different as the times. Then my young children played in my studio. Now I have the company of my grandson and my elder daughter lives in a distant country. Today the remembrance of being
the father of a young family and starting out as a painter seems as remote and distant as my childhood.

Peter Siddell 1998

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

Begin with Peter Siddell's Gulf (1998). In the foreground, there is a cemetery, what one might term a place of monuments for the dead. In the background, Auckland's cityscape, what one might term a monument to the living. What can Siddell's Gulf possibly be? Is it the space between life and death? Or the one between the lure of life, suggested, perhaps, by the Sky Tower, against its inescapable finitude found in Virgil's chiselled pronouncement, Forsan et haec olim meminesse juvibat - Perhaps even these things will someday give pleasure to recall. Or is Gulf merely reflecting the immediacy of place, the reality of the Hauraki Gulf, made specific, in part, by Rangitoto's identifiable form rising near the painting's centre? It is all of these and none. The true meaning of the work, Siddell's intention, is forever hidden from us. It is here that one might first position what I am terming "the real", which is what one is left with when everything one might imagine about the work, and everything that the work might symbolise, is left behind for this double reading. In coming to terms with the fact that "between our reading of the work and the work itself the real intention of the work is excluded", the viewer can also come to the fact that their real experience of the work comes precisely from this undecidability. And this is written on the surface of the painting precisely insofar as there are always already two intertwined possibilities at play - life and death, movement and stillness, clear sky and cloud. It is as if Siddell is telling us that there is a real, but it is a subjective, personal one, based on our pathways through the choices he portrays. 

Brett  Levine. 
(Re)visioning the Real
Lopdell House Gallery
1998