Peter J Hill speaks to editor, Kevin Keipe, about his colourful life.
PH: There’s the old draught horse on his own, the one with the dust in the background. Old Baldy. He belonged to my grandfather, Sam King. He had quite a few draught horses when I was a kid and I was rapt in them. That horse is a horse from my childhood, taken off a little black and white photograph that I got off my grandfather when he was working his horses. I took that horse out of the team and made him single and put him with his reigns flowing. If my old grandfather had seen the horse doing what he was doing there, he would have kicked my arse because that horse never used to do those sort of things. He was an old placid.
GG: In the painting, he is basically taking off?
PH: He has got away from the rest – “I’ve had this work – I’m pissing off, back to the chaff bag.” Over the years I have painted him several times, but in different sorts of situations and different colours. You will never see two paintings exactly the same. It’s impossible to paint two exactly the same but I use that same horse… people either want a smaller one or they want a bigger one. They love that horse. My philosophy is simply this: If it sells, you paint it. If it doesn’t ,don’t paint it.
GG: A lot of people would be critical of that.
PH: They certainly are, but my argument to that is simply that if you’re going to paint something worth $10-$20 or $30,000, it’s a one off, a complete one-off. I might paint him galloping instead of just trotting. I have had him jumping.
GG: He’s had a pretty exciting life in your hands?
PH: Yeah, he never works. He’s always heading off to the chaff bag!
GG: How old would he be if he were still around today?
PH: He has been gone since about 1948. He was about 16 when he died on a property out of Scone.
GG: You grew up there?
PH: No, I was there for three years and then Dad and Mum shifted to Merrylands and I grew up there, near Parramatta, (NSW). In those days, in 1940, it was just like an old country town. All paddocks. I had horses when I was about nine. We were always riding them. You go back there now and it’s all bloody houses.
I was there until I left school at 15 and all I wanted to do was go to the bush. My Dad wanted me to be a songwriter because I was always good at drawing at school. I was at the back of the classroom drawing horses and cattle and anything else I wanted to draw, and next minute the old teacher would come down and bang my head on the desk. I wouldn’t know he was there because I was so rapt in what I was doing. Instead of doing my maths and English, I was drawing.
He would bang my head on the desk as they used to in those days, about the fact that I was not going to get anywhere because I just didn’t want to learn and all I wanted to do was draw. He was trying to teach me algebra, but from the day I left school I have never once had to use algebra so he would have been better off to teach me drawing instead.
I left school in second year. There were three sign writing jobs vacant at the time and I applied for all three of them. I was 16. I worked as a wood bender for about 12 months, and this was when I decided to go to the bush. Another job was advertised (at a rural agents) to work on a property out from Gunning, between Goulburn and Yass.
Unbeknownst to me, I got the job and so did two other blokes at the same time. The guy arrived to pick us up in a Daimier. I had never seen anything like it before. Anyway, he takes us out about eight miles to this property. He was an old Pommie aristocrat and arrogant as well. He set the three of us up on this bloody old shed, dirt floor, couple of old beds, a round washbasin and nothing else. It was an old hay shed and that’s where we lived for about six weeks.
They fed us on fly-blown meat and we couldn’t do any washing there at all. It was just a case of washing in the dam. The dam was full of leaches and muddy water. We didn’t take too kindly to it, young blokes out of the city. We had to milk ten cows night and morning by hand. There were 14 rabbit dogs and 13 sheep dogs and we used to have to unhook the rabbit dogs in the morning, let them off the chains and they would go mad. It was a lovely old homestead and he was doing it all up. We ate out on the verandah with the dogs, chooks and cats, and they would just hand us out our food through the door.
(Time passes)
There were caravan manufacturers everywhere and still only two percent of the public was buying caravans. I hung on and hung on and hung on. It was then that I started to paint a little bit more.
GG: Stress relief?
PH: Absolutely right. I couldn’t sleep at night because of what was happening so I would paint. I would get up at 3am or 4am and paint. I would sell my paintings – then I finally know that the writing was on the wall and I had lost it all, my home, the whole works, but we had started with virtually nothing.
I went down to Melbourne and we rented a place at Mt Dandenong and I knew that I had a marketable product so I set myself to sell my paintings…. to everybody that I knew in the caravan industry and the car game and the insurance game, all the big nobs that were still firing pretty well and I got on well with them all. Had conferences and so they all bought paintings off me and they kicked me along and I kept going, and going further. I gave myself five years to get back on my feet. Did that in less than five years.
In the Dandenongs. Sold that gallery in 1983 and in 1984 bought a house in Canberra and shifted the family there. From then on I was on the way. I looked at Canberra as a place to be because I was having art shows there prior to moving up and it is the last place to feel the effects of the recession.
There will always be money in Canberra… there was not a better place to be. Then I started branching out further and I was going up to Queensland and going out west. I have had art shows all over Australia and I have had three art shows for the WA Pastoralists’ and Graziers’ Association, at the time of their annual conferences.
We sell a lot of paintings in Western Australia as well as all other states in Australia and overseas. Money that is raised in any charity exhibition goes to that particular organisation whether it be the Lions, Cancer Foundation etc. I would rather given a percentage to a worthy cause than give it to a gallery, which is why I do not put paintings into galleries. I started off by putting paintings in some galleries but they wanted them all on consignment. Some gallery directors seem to want to exploit the artist and in some cases, are very late to pay.
GG: Basically you went broke – to become a painter?
PH: Yeah, I see things differently from a lot of people, I think. What you see is what you get. People were saving, “God wanted me to be an artist.” I often hear people say they are praying for rain. Well, who the f**k gave them the drought?
I’m a spiritual person and I would walk into any church if I wanted to say a bloody prayer or under a gum tree. You don’t have to go to church to say prayers.
Since then I have had art shows everywhere and one-man exhibitions and only concentrated on that, as well as going out into the backcountry. Out around Winton I have exhibited at every outback festival since 1991 and I will be back this year. I have got a one-man exhibition at Augathella, then Winton.
Peter J Hill - Australian Bush Artist 