Peter Godwin: Studio and Mountains
In Studio and Mountains, Peter Godwin returns to the intimate world of his studio, exploring the shifting presence of light and the quiet accumulation of objects, forms and images within it. These interiors are spaces of reflection and ongoing discovery, where the ordinary details of the artist’s surroundings become subjects of sustained attention. Among them, mountain motifs (Li River, China) offer reminders of another world, held within the studio and folded into its visual rhythms. The paintings remain grounded in this interior space, where light, memory and observation continually reshape what is seen.
Godwin’s studio on the NSW Central Coast is a place profoundly shaped by natural light. Large sheets of canvas hang across the windows, filtering the intensity of the sun and bathing the room in a warm, golden hue. As the light shifts throughout the day, furniture, objects and architectural details emerge and recede, their forms softened or momentarily dissolved. This changing atmosphere is central to Godwin’s practice. Light is not simply a means of describing space, but an active presence that lends the paintings their sense of time, impermanence and quiet uncertainty.
Working with a tempera emulsion, Godwin builds his paintings through fine, translucent layers, gradually adding and removing paint to reveal the structures beneath. Pale greys and umbers replace the denser blocks of colour found in his earlier interiors and nocturnes. Graphite marks remain visible across the surface, loosely tracing furniture and objects while retaining the immediacy of drawing. The interplay between these exposed lines and delicate washes of paint creates an atmosphere in which forms hover between definition and dissolution.
Recurring elements—a patterned curtain, black and white tiles, a window, a canvas resting on an easel—provide subtle structures within these distilled interiors. Smaller mountain motifs sit among these familiar objects, their presence introducing a further dimension to the studio as a space of looking, collecting and contemplation. They are not departures from the interior, but part of its fabric: images held within the artist’s immediate surroundings, quietly extending the imaginative reach of the room.
Studio and Mountains offers an intimate encounter with Godwin’s working world. Through restrained colour, delicate mark-making and an acute sensitivity to light, the studio becomes more than a physical setting. It is a space in which the observed and the imagined coexist, and where even the smallest motif can open onto a wider field of association. These paintings ask us to look slowly, attending to the subtle relationships between objects, images and the light that holds them together.
A graduate of the National Art School, Peter Godwin lectured in painting, drawing and printmaking at the school for many years. He was awarded the Gruner Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1979 and again in 1985. He has been a recipient of the Mosman Art Prize and has also hung as a finalist in the Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW. Godwin was awarded the Australia China Art Residency Art Prize in 2026.
His work is held in numerous private and public collections, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Orange Regional Gallery, Parliament House, Canberra, Government House, Sydney and the National Gallery of Australia. A major survey exhibition, Peter Godwin - Space, Light & Time, was shown at Orange Regional Gallery in 2024 and S.H. Ervin Gallery in Sydney in 2025.
