Don Peebles ONZM (1922 – 2010)
Born in Taneatua, Bay of Plenty in 1922, Peebles moved to Wellington in 1924. He worked in the Post Office from 1937-41, before joining the army as a signalman, serving in the Pacific, Middle East and Italy. In 1945, he studied art in Florence as part of a British Army demobilisation programme.
On returning to New Zealand, he again joined the Post Office, and undertook part-time studies in Wellington Technical College. From 1951-53 he underook full time studies at Julian Ashton Art School, Sydney, receiving the Philip Musket Award for Landscape (1953). His first solo exhibition was in 1954 at the Architectural Centre Gallery, Wellington and in 1960 he won the Association of NZ Art Societies fellowship award.
After marrying Prue Corkill, he travelled to the UK where he worked with Victor Pasmore. In 1963, he returned to Wellington, New Zealand, moving to Christchurch in 1965 to work at the University of Canterbury as Lecturer in the School of Fine Arts, retiring in 1984. He became an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) in 1999, received an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Canterbury University in 2003, and in 2007, won an Arts Foundation Icon Award. His numerous solo and group exhibitions include retrospectives in 1973-1974 (Dowse Art Gallery), and 1996-1997 (Robert McDougall Art Gallery). Both toured the country.
One of the major figures in New Zealand modernist art, Peebles was a pioneer of abstract art in this country. Throughout a career that spanned over 60 years, he remained a significant influence on his own and subsequent generations of New Zealand artists. He constantly reinvented himself, bringing a freshness of ideas and form to each artwork. His work was often pared back to a deceptive simplicity, as he juxtaposed texture, harmonised colour and composition to the ultimate point of balance. While his work tended towards mimimalism, it was only to the point where a sublime tension existed between the elements and the work – a true ‘harmony of opposites’.
His work is held in major public and private collections around the country and is an essential ingredient in key surveys of contemporary, abstract or modernist New Zealand art.
Peebles died in 2010, and his wife Prue, his constant supporter and companion, died 2012. They are survived by their children Karen, John and Colin.