Peter Simpson: Across the Quiet Water

Inspired by the words of Hisham Matar – who writes about paintings requiring time to truly unfold – Peter Simpson’s lyrical landscapes are best viewed slowly, quietly. There is a stillness in the Sydney artist’s renditions of land and sea, a soft tranquillity that holds us in silent embrace until discoveries begin to bloom.

Created slowly over the past three years, the paintings in Simpson’s new collection ‘Across the Quiet Water’ signal a return to earlier works capturing the coast. Simpson takes the viewer on a meandering journey along the New South Wales coastline, where headlands loom like reclining sphinxes and the sea stretches out to infinity. More than geography, though, it is a voyage of light that we find ourselves on as we glide through these beguiling vistas. In works like Harbour Roofs and Trees, and Burning Bright (Late Afternoon), the fading sun settles like a fine, luminous powder on the contours of the landscape. Shape and form give way to light and colour in atmospheric splendour. Yet far from sublime splendour, Simpson gives us a quiet, humble grandeur – the kind that doesn’t clutch you in awe, but trickles softly into your mind and memories, until it is unforgettable.

As each scene stretches out beyond the boundary of the canvas, there is a sense of timelessness, and limitlessness. A calm atemporality is cultivated by Simpson’s process of working, and reworking, slowly. About this body of work, the artist describes a “slow evolution” along a path punctured with struggle and doubt, but ultimately filled with reward and discovery. “Something special has come out of it,” he reflects, “They’ve become my pictures more than I’ve ever felt before, despite how difficult they were to create.” Each painting shimmers with a fortitude that comes only from perseverance, and grace. The distant shoreline in the show’s titlepiece glints with light and enquiry, while the hazy horizon is swallowed by an eternal sky. This piece was formerly a painting of Hyde Park, which Simpson sanded and gradually reworked into a layered and luminous harbour scene. There is a new kind of poetry in these paintings, a ballad of endurance where erasure mingles with epiphany in the same stanza.

Though these works are more about the process than the picture, Simpson is still true to the landscapes he depicts, consciously engaging with historical ancestors of landscape painting – from Romantic innovators to Modern Australian masters like Arthur Streeton, Sidney Nolan and Fred Williams. This series traces trips as far north as Smiths Lakes on the Mid North Coast, around the Brisbane Waters at Pretty Beach and through the bush of the Bouddi National Park descending to Lobster Beach. Further to the south (and closer to home), we pass through Sydney Harbour, the Eastern Suburbs, and Botany Bay. The trees in Embrace (Pretty Beach) lean into each other as if posing for a family portrait, while the golden glow of dusk shimmers through their silhouettes. Simpson describes a “new gentleness” in this series, and it can be seen strongly in this work, felt, in the cotton wool leaves of his dry brushwork, and the spectral palette that melts the forms in the distance. In Port Botany, Late Afternoon, a container terminal is made ethereal by Simpson’s soft brush. The terminal seems to float unanchored from the shore as tones of sky and water collide with the closing of the day. An abstraction dwells in these vast fields of dusty blue, mesmeric in its simplicity. Softly splicing the dominant horizontals, a central light reflects in the waters of the bay, Gatsby-esque, full of promise. The lit shoreline asks us, what are we seeking? This scene – and all in the series – pulsates with an invisible synergy as artist and viewer stand together, breathe together, move together across the undulations of the landscape. Carried in the wind of a sail, or the gentle current of the sea.

Elli Walsh

Principle Writer, Artist Profile

Simpson’s work is held in numerous public and private collections in Australia and abroad including Artbank, Lincoln Institute, Australia Post, City of Monash, Australian Club, Melbourne and BHP. The artist has exhibited widely throughout Australia, and has won several awards including People’s Selection, Best Painting at Cowra Regional Art Gallery (2008) as well as being selected as the Artist in Residence at the Arthur Boyd Studio, Bundanon.