Biography

Emigrating with his family from New Zealand to Australia in the late 1960’s, Peter O’Doherty is a self-taught painter. He has been exhibiting regularly over the past 20 years in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and internationally in England and New Zealand.

Most recently there has been a concentration on urban and suburban themes in his work – fibro and brick house, blocks of flats, high rise facades, front yards, porches, and garages alongside chairs, aeroplanes, trams and landscapes. His representational paintings are tonal assemblages of oblique geometric detail imbued with dense shadow and vivid Australian light.

O’Doherty has been hung in numerous art prizes including the Sulman and the Salon des Refuses. He has won the Paddington Art Prize for landscape, the Commendation Award at the Mosman Art Prize and the Alan Gamble Memorial Prize for the built environment.

From 2014-2017, Peter and his wife Susan O’Doherty have had a collaborative regional gallery touring exhibition ‘Moving House’, combining her assemblages depicting various rooms of the house and his canvases of external suburban house facades.

For two decades, he was prominent musically as the former bass player in the band ‘Mental As Anything’. Nowadays, as a musical outlet, he and his brother, the painter, musician and illustrator Reg Mombassa / Chris O’Doherty, perform and release albums together as Dog Trumpet.