As a young man, long before I started painting I spent many vacations tramping and climbing in New Zealand’s Southern Alps. On a recent journey through the South Island I once again saw the mountains of my youth
The paintings in this exhibition are based on my responses to that journey and recollections of times long past.
Directly west from Fox Glacier is Gillespies Beach and gazing up to the high summits of the main divide from the edge of the waves I recalled how over forty years ago, while climbing among those peaks, I had looked down through the clouds and seen this distant strip of surf. The four paintings of Gillespies Beach are all based on memories of the same place but from different points and different times.
The road to Milford Sound through the Homer Tunnel is one of the few roads in New Zealand where it is possible to drive through an alpine valley under towering glaciated mountains
I have paid a number of visits to Milford Sound and was once again awed by its magnificence and reminded how artists like John Buchanan, Eugene von Guérard and the unknown artist from HMS Acheron had created images of the place that would be impossible to capture photographically.
In 1876 von Guérard visited New Zealand and subsequently his two views from Middle Island became the most widely exhibited New Zealand paintings of the nineteenth century. His painting of Milford Sound now hangs in the Gallery of New South Wales while its companion, a view of Lake Wakatipu, is in the Auckland City Art Gallery. In 1954 an ascent of Mt Earnslaw, the main summit in the von Guérard painting of Lake Wakatipu, was my introduction to mountaineering.
The two paintings Fiord and Lake in this exhibition refer to the same places and are the same size as the von Guérard works but are separated by time and very different personal experience.

Peter Siddell 2000