Hello Hello Sydney Minx
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"The feeling of entering a magical realm begins before you even get to Peter Kingston’s former home in Lavender Bay. You leave the street on the hillside above the house and take the steeply sloping stairs towards the harbour. Not wanting to miss your footing, you try to ignore the cobalt seductiveness of Sydney Harbour glinting through a frame of trees way below.
Ginger Meggs zooming downhill in a billycart — or at least, a small wooden figurine of the old-time cartoon character — comes into view on the fence line outside Kingston’s place. You open the gate, cross a kind of rickety gangplank above a tangled garden, and enter the artist’s romantically tumbledown home. It resembles, as his sister Fairlie Kingston puts it, ‘a studio that someone happens to sleep in’."
Over 70 works including prints, artist’s books, sketchbooks and printing plates from across Peter Kingston’s career are on display, in a moving tribute to the late artist.Peter Kingston (1943–2022) lived and worked at the edge of Sydney Harbour. After a childhood spent at Parsley Bay, he settled in Lavender Bay among a community of artists and friends. From there, he observed harbour ferries, Luna Park and the Sydney Opera House in all seasons and weather. These were the subjects of his work, often incorporating his boat, the MV Anytime, and his dogs.
Kingston’s output ranged across drawing, printing, painting and filmmaking. A passion for Sydney, for environmental conservation and the preservation of built heritage never left him. Joyful, charming, and with a wry humour, his work celebrates the everyday aspects of our city. Yet there is a bittersweet element to his work. Peter Kingston often talked about ‘time as an artist’, his way of recognising the beauty and value that accumulates with age. His work captures things at risk in a world that is always upgrading, and expresses a nostalgic yearning for those places and characters now lost.
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