John Peart (1945 – 2013) found early success as an artist. At just twenty-three he was selected for the National Gallery of Victoria’s legendary exhibition, ‘The Field’, an unprecedented showing of abstract art that incited outrage in the media. To the concern of his gallerist, Frank Watters, Peart contributed minimalist canvases that marked a steep departure from his popular calligraphic works. “Collectors were furious”, recalled Watters – but Peart did not care.

Uninterested in money, acclaim or status, Peart’s journey through art was spiritual. He worked from the premise of subtraction and like a sculptor, would carve away at his paper or canvas to leave forms in white space. That his abstractions evoke the landscape was not incidental but instead a move towards creating “an inner landscape for the mind’s eye to roam.” There is a profoundly meditative quality to Peart’s work, how it trades in rhythm, resonance, echo, flow and continuity.

Across his lifetime, Peart lived and worked in the United States, United Kingdom, Europe and India, eventually settling in the Wedderburn artist community in New South Wales where he died prematurely during bushfires. In his wake, Peart left a body of work that is at once exhilarating, inventive and investigative. As the art historian Danial Thomas wrote in 1968, Peart’s “pictures expand. They claim the space that surrounds them and the time beyond the moment when the spectator sees them”. 

Represented across state collections, Peart won the Wynne Prize in 1997, the Sulman in 2000 and was a two-time Archibald finalist. The riddle of life, he believed, was to always try to surprise yourself.