Peter Hudson (b.1950) is a landscape and portrait painter based in Maleny, Queensland. In the 1990s he began travelling in the Northern Territory making many trips to Gurindji country. He continues to make painting trips for at least a month each year.
Peter Hudson is as interested in the social and cultural history of the places he paints, as the natural landforms. He sees place inextricably woven with it’s myths, ‘legends and psyche of it’s inhabitants’. He is very drawn to the mystery of the night sky. He says ‘to look to the heavens at night helps me understand the mind blowing scale of the universe, a reminder of the surreal reality of this beautiful green planet’. His works Bird and Sea Snake and Feathers and Scales, play with the strange similitude of the sea and the sky and it’s ‘surreal reality’. And like Sidney Nolan in his bird paintings from the later 1940s, Hudson looks for the strange links between things. The parrots in Hudson’s paintings appear as if they have arrived incomprehensibly from a dream.
Hudson exhibits in Brisbane, Sydney, Townsville, Caloundra.
His work is in the National Portrait Gallery, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, National Maritime Museum, Queensland Parliament House, Caloundra Regional Gallery, Moreton Bay Regional Council, Sunshine Coast Regional Council, Tamworth Regional Gallery, Warrnambool Art Gallery, University of the Sunshine Coast.
