Peter Booth
The Human Condition

Peter Booth is an epic sto­ry­teller. His art records an odyssey pow­ered by imag­i­na­tion and dis­ci­plined by four decades of paint­ing and draw­ing. The imagery of his work, dis­tanced from the imme­di­ate and the par­tic­u­lar, gains ascent to wider uni­ver­sal read­ing by virtue of its pow­er in address­ing both the cul­tur­al chimeras of our myth­ic past and prophe­cies of the imag­ined future. Nur­tured by lit­er­a­ture and drawn from dreams and mem­o­ry which have sur­vived the devo­lu­tion of time, Booth’s dra­mat­ic and poet­ic images of the human spir­it are framed with­in a world both observed and imag­ined. Their por­tray­al of dif­fer­ent psy­cho­log­i­cal states of mind doc­u­ments a cul­tur­al jour­ney that tra­vers­es anx­i­ety, vio­lence, spir­i­tu­al tur­moil, alien­ation and acceptance.

Excerpt from ​‘Hard Rain: The Iconog­ra­phy of Peter Booth’, Robert Lind­say, in Peter Booth: HUMAN/NATURE, Nation­al Gallery of Vic­to­ria, 2003-04