A faint whiff of solvent tickles my nostrils the moment I step inside artist Peter Hudson’s Maleny studio. It tells me immediately that he paints with oils.
Dotted around the studio are some impressive Australian landscape paintings, some abstract in style.
One work-in-progress is of a vivid seascape. This painting draws my eyes to the moon in the top left corner. I feel the energy of the moon and sense its magnetic pull as the sea creatures swim in its direction.
The self-effacing 75-year-old artist combines realism and abstraction, drawing inspiration from nature and mythology in an attempt to answer the eternal ‘Why?’. Why are we human beings here on planet Earth?
Paul’s artworks feature in major state and national public collections and have also been snapped up by private collectors nationally and internationally. It’s easy to understand the appeal of his landscapes and portraitures because his paintings make the viewer feel something.
“You don’t explain your work, you hopefully rely on the painting to do the explaining.
“As Jackson Pollock said: ‘A painting should look good and say something’. That’s my mantra.
“In the end, they’re paintings for someone to hang on their walls, to look at and enjoy. So, they have to look good and they have to say something.”
Finding this degree of expression in his art has been a lifetime journey for Paul. In his twenties, he went to art school in Brisbane and graduated as a graphic artist in 1975. But while he took the commercial art route, his creative soul yearned to be a ‘real’ painter.
A couple of teachers at art school had a profound influence on Paul: Nick Mourtzakis and Robert Mercer. These two young artists came up to Queensland to teach, bringing with them a Melbourne art aesthetic, which appealed to and influenced him.
He describes the thunderbolt moment he first saw some of Mourtzakis’ personal work, very small self-portraits, which he says were: “So good and so distant from where I was that it was just pure inspiration, like an insight into another whole new art world, another art life.”
Paul says it made him “do a turn on a sixpence” and embark on the journey to becoming a painter.
“I started my own education from that point. I started reading a lot and looking at a lot of art and looking at art history, and it just never stopped, and it will never stop.
“As Sidney Nolan said when someone asked him about being an artist in old age and having financial security and so forth, he said: ‘The rewards are there till the last 10 minutes’.
“As an artist gets older, it is not necessarily about getting better at it, it’s more about being honest with yourself and with the work you are doing.”
It took Paul a quarter of a century to arrive at this point though. Like many creatives — Paul is also a drummer — he found it difficult to make “a normal living” out of art and music.
To support what he calls his “music and art habit”, Paul did a jewellery apprenticeship. Being a jeweller for 20 years paid the mortgage and bills until he arrived at a point in 2000 when he felt ready to “jump off the cliff” and start painting full-time.
Paul paints both in his studio and en plein air (French for ‘in the open air’). He says plein air painting is truth-telling and making art in the studio is storytelling.
“A good plein air painter finds their way into a painting by being right there inside the painting.
“Out there you are part of the painting, you become part of the landscape, looking, listening and feeling and responding as best you can.”
Paul developed a feeling for landscape as a six-year-old when his family lived in Longreach in Central West Queensland. As a kid living on the outskirts of town, he was always playing in the bush.
“I think that’s when I first became aware of landscape. As a kid in Longreach, I started to notice how weather changes everything, the look of the country and how it affects both animals and humans.
“When you look at a landscape you only see its skin, you don’t see the hidden things that make it work and help make it look beautiful, you don’t see all the life going on in there — all the animals, birds, reptiles, insects all going about their business, living, breeding and dying.”
As an adult, Paul had different experiences with Aboriginal Australia, doing art trips which immersed him once again in the bush. He says that’s when he really learned to be a painter.
The Glass House Mountains are the reason Paul came to live in Maleny as a painter. He says they have a special presence, which he uses as props for storytelling. The MacDonnell Ranges in the Northern Territory, north Queensland and Central Australia are also special places for Paul, where he’s done a lot of plein air work.
Being immersed in the landscape, Paul says it’s impossible to capture all details, such as the changing light and shadows; not even a camera does a landscape justice.
“But if you can trap some of the spirit of the landscape into your paint, then you have a chance of ending up with a decent-looking painting.”
Paul was one of the first artists to exhibit at Caloundra Regional Art Gallery when it opened in 2000. Some of Hudson’s works are now a permanent part of the Sunshine Coast Art Collection and following the gallery’s Land Holds Memory exhibition (2023), he gifted more works to the collection. The exhibition explored several artists’ experiences in the Bunya Mountains, Girraween National Park and Carnarvon Gorge.
In 2009, Paul was the first local artist to win the coveted Sunshine Coast Art National Art Prize and is one of the few living and working artists in our region who can claim to be an Archibald finalist with his Words and Music —portrait of Paul Kelly (2007).
Paul entered the Sunshine Coast National Art Prize again this year with a painting called Long Distance Relationship. It’s about the relationship between the moon, the ocean and its underwater world; and the moon and the Earth.
“I paint the moon and stars often. Looking at the night sky is a great way of understanding scale, it reminds me of how small we are, and that the enormity of the universe is beyond our comprehension.
“The moon and stars are in every painting and drawing I make, even if they can’t be seen.”
Reflecting on his regular art practice, Paul says music is just as important to him as art and he plays the drums every day.
“I’m enjoying now more than ever both playing music and making art, discovering new and old ways of making marks and making sounds. Music and art save me.”