Peter Neilson, Princes Park, 2017, charcoal. pastel, drawing, Parkville,
Summary
Melbourne-born artist Peter Neilson works across media, notably painting, sculpture and drawing. Each medium, he says, has its own particularities, making it pointless to seek out a conversation between his figurative works in each. But what is common to his practice is the capacity of his consummate mark-making to render each work individual, bespoke.
‘Princes Park: The Graveyard End in Fog’, a drawing in charcoal, pastel and chalk, is one of a group of such landscapes shown in his 2019 Australian Galleries exhibition ‘Staring into the Middle Distance’, after which it was acquired for the Art and Heritage Collection. As drawings, rather than realist representations of particular views, the exhibited works expressed a sympathetic pact between landscape, weather and materials – meditations on practice as much as on place. But a sense of place they do evoke, and ‘Princes Park: The Graveyard End in Fog’ exemplifies that tendency. The inherent softness of pastel, charcoal and chalk operate in perfect concert with the watery indistinctness of fog, the long, low and soft horizon and even the idea of sepulchral proximity. The pact between panorama, atmosphere and materials here mask and yet subtly reveal a recognisable place on the northern fringe of Melbourne city.
