Ardent sailor and artist Peter Anderson depicts the awesome splendour of the ocean as Earth's final wilderness, in a painting launched recently in CQUniversity's Rockhampton Campus library...

While Peter Anderson is acknowledged as one of Australia's most talented painters, he also has the distinction of being an experienced sailor who has twice circumnavigated the world. 

Southern approach, Campbell Island by Peter Anderson

Anderson grew up in a boating family in Brisbane and, after graduating from several art colleges in Australia, was just 21 when he went to sea for three years in the 1970s on the sailing ship Eye of the Wind, during its operation Drake circumnavigation.  His second circumnavigation was in the mid-1990s aboard his 36ft steel ketch Kerryvore with his wife Kim.

These long voyages gave him the time to study and absorb the details of waves, wind and sky and their constant changes in colour and mood.  As a skilful painter, Anderson is able to capture these fleeting moments with his brushes and share the sublime beauty of remote ocean destinations with people who do not have the opportunity to sail.

Artist Peter Anderson is flanked by Art Collection Manager Sue Smith and Chancellor Rennie Fritschy during a ceremony to welcome the painting to Rockhampton Campus

"I aim to draw the viewer into my paintings and allow them to experience the wind and the sea as I did," he said in a recent interview, prior to his solo exhibition of paintings of New Zealand's sub-Antarctic islands in Brisbane's Philip Bacon Galleries.

CQUniversity this week welcomed one of the big paintings acquired from the exhibition, an oil on canvas entitled Southern approach, Campbell Island.

It shows the view from aboard ship across rolling waves to the isolated, World Heritage-listed isle, which lies some 700km south of New Zealand - a bleak and beautiful volcanic hilltop with pointed peaks and broken cliffs behind a gauze of morning mist.

"I call them the Shipwreck Isles," Anderson says of the remote isles he visited last year aboard Spirit of Enderby, a former Russian survey ship which now takes small parties to the Snares, the Auckland Isles, Enderby Island and Campbell Island in the great Southern Ocean, a windswept and at times forbidding swathe of sea that encircles Antarctica.

During the nineteenth century, sailing ships leaving Australian ports and heading towards Cape Horn chose these islands as a way-point, but some isles were incorrectly charted and many vessels were wrecked in the dark with tremendous loss of life.

CQUniversity Art Collection Manager Sue Smith says that, like J M W Turner and the American painters of the Hudson River School, Peter Anderson "brings an epic vision to his depiction of remote islands and ocean". This is high praise, but merited by the work, she says.

"He combines a meticulous and awe-inspiring depiction of nature with a modern artist's sensibility and conservation message of the importance of the oceans as Earth's final wilderness."

Few of Anderson's paintings depict people, for a reason.  In voyaging across the oceans, he says he found plastic and other junk everywhere, even in the Southern Ocean, and is appalled by the "wreckage left behind by human beings".

"The stuff that ships' crews still chuck over the side is staggering. That is why I choose to leave human beings out of my paintings."

The artist has described his work as "simple, evocative stuff".

"I'm trying to reach people, to touch their consciousness, to make them aware that we inhabit an awesome planet."