Peter UPWARD

Australian 1932–83
worked in England 1962–71

Peter Upward named his paintings after the time when he made them. His most famous is June celebration, 1960, now in the National Gallery of Australia. September tablet, 1961, is from the same series, painted when Upward was living in an old building in Victoria Street, Potts Point, an area near Kings Cross where many of Sydney’s avant-garde, such as John Olsen, Stan Rapotec and Clement Meadmore, also lived. Upward and Meadmore were friends and colleagues in Melbourne in the 1950s. Before moving to Sydney to work as a sculptor, Meadmore set up Gallery A in Flinders Lane where Upward held his first exhibition. Upward, like Meadmore, was interested in jazz improvisation and as an artist ‘wanted to face international modernity’.1 He was a student of Zen, gestural abstraction and Asian calligraphy. Upward, alone in Melbourne, had a dominant focus on gestural abstraction. In Sydney his art reached a more open-minded audience. He once said, ‘If Jackson Pollack was working in Melbourne, what hell they would be giving him’.2 In his Potts Point loft Upward worked on the floor, experimenting with enamels and acrylics, painting with brushes the size of brooms, in colours of purple and green and underlying black. He is the purely gestural artist of that time, and Australia has had very few such artists. ‘Upward’s flat white paintings are merely neutral ground on which the black gesture happens.’3

1 John Olsen, Australian, Sydney, 14 November 1983, Obituary.

2 Olsen, ibid.

3 R. Hughes, The Art of Australia, Melbourne, revised edition, 1970, p. 282.

Jennifer Phipps