Book Launch: Peter Cleverley: Between Transience and Eternity by Alistair Fox

Join Alistair Fox and Peter Cleverly for the launch of Between Transcience and Eternity 

About the Artist

Peter Cleverley was born in Oamaru in 1954 and works from a studio at his home in Kakanui, North Otago, having gained a Diploma in Fine & Applied Arts in 1974. As well as lecturing at the Dunedin School of Art since 1987 until his retirement, he has exhibited in Wellington, Ashburton, Gore, and Dunedin, including the recent ‘Zeitgeist: Works by Peter Cleverley’, curated by the Forrester Gallery, Oamaru, in 2023. His works are held in the permanent collections of many New Zealand public art galleries, including Te Papa; the Dunedin Public Art Gallery; Forrester Public Art Gallery, Oamaru; Suter Gallery, Nelson; Aigantighe Gallery, Timaru; Hocken Library, Dunedin; and the Manawatu Public Gallery, Palmerston North. 

A painter who is strongly identified with the Otago region, working primarily in gouache and oil, Cleverley is noted for his vivid palette, oneiric imagery, and sustained, expansive, and deeply personal iconography.

About the Author

Alistair Fox is professor emeritus at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, where he held a Personal Chair in English and also served as Pro-Vice Chancellor, Division of Humanities. Born in Richmond, Nelson, he attended Waimea College, and gained  BA Honours and Masters degrees (1970) at the University of Canterbury before being awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to study for a PhD at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, completed in 1974. His honours include the award of a Nuffield Visiting Fellowship to Claire Hall, Cambridge (1980–1981), appointment as a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford (1987–1988), and an invitation to La Chaire Roger Odin at La Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris (2020).

Initially known for his scholarship on English Tudor literature, since 2008 Fox has turned to topics addressing cinema studies, art history, theories of literary and cinematic representation and Aotearoa New Zealand literature and culture. From 2019, he has regularly written catalogue essays, most frequently for RDS Gallery, Dunedin, which he owns (2020–current). Peter Cleverley: Between Transience and Eternity evolved as a consequence of two catalogue essays written for two exhibitions by the Otago artist Peter Cleverley, “Blue Daisy Chain” (9 October–7 November 2020) and “Never There Yet” (29 October–21 November 2021). This book extends Fox’s concerns defined in his earlier publications, which sought to explore the role of fiction, across media, in expressing the nature of self and identity, here within the context of Aotearoa New Zealand art history.

About the Book
This beautiful, heavily illustrated book traces Peter Cleverley’s formation and evolution as an artist, identifying the myriad influences that aroused in him a profound sense of the transience of human life and the paradoxical complexity of the human condition. The portrait that results shows how Cleverley’s sense of the human condition has allowed him to convey it symbolically in a way that simultaneously captures not only the fragility of human life, but also its joys.
His art communicates an appreciation of the beauty of this world and the gift of being alive, together with the value of art as a means of transcending mutability.
Cleverley is a painter whose work is destined to be recognised for making an important contribution to the history of art in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Hardback, 210mm wide x 250mm tall, layflat binding, more than 90 reproductions and images, 176 pages.

$60.00. Available now at selected galleries, all good booksellers, or online at:
Quentin Wilson Publishing

and

Nationwide Book Distributors Ltd