“It’s terrible times that make me paint beautiful things.”

That is what Kakanui artist Peter Cleverley says of his upcoming Dreams Are Free exhibition at the Forrester Gallery & Mahika Kai Mahika Toi.

The new exhibition, which opens to the public on Saturday, focuses on the feminine form as a source of empowerment for the future.

Ten paintings make up the body of work.

Cleverley cites the female figure as a source of empowerment, betterment and strength — as a hopeful way forward providing optimism and comfort during times of destruction and conflict.

Cleverley’s work was always about the human condition, he said.

“I’ve made these female figures, the compositions are really quite simple.

“There’s peaceful things while I talk about the world on fire at the moment.

“You know our dreams of betterment, they’re optimistic, they’re futuristic and they’re of hope.”

The renowned, award-winning New Zealand artist said he had female figures in mind for the new exhibition and several were featured in a book on his 40-year career Peter Cleverley: Between Transience and Eternity, written by Alistair Fox.

“When Pip [Cleverley’s partner] and I came home from Italy, in Sicily with the boat people attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea from North Africa, they were just beautiful people and they’d been made to leave their homes and risk everything.

“It’s terrible things that make me paint beautiful things.”

Influenced by New Zealand painter Colin McCahon, who said “paintings shouldn’t be looked at they should be read”, Cleverley created his 2021 painting Am I Standing in the Right Place where the girl in the painting is depicted as extremely vulnerable, in a way that is designed to elicit humane understanding and compassion. 

Cleverley cited singer and poet Leonard Cohen’s quote “I wish women would hurry up and take over”, “because it’s going to happen, it’s just a matter of time”.

“I really do feel that the monsters are always male.”

“When I paint the figures sometimes the lines are too good, I want it more separated from me so I use a piece of wood or sometimes toothpicks or turps and oily laden rags to put the paint on.”

Cleverley says he does not want “to be in control of everything” and that viewers also need to be entertained.

His painting Mother (1989), created when Cleverley was working at the Forrester Gallery as an exhibitions officer, features a single female figure and two smaller upside figures like a mother and child, a paua shell, a reference to his daily beach walks in Kakanui, and a painting of a pot made by ceramic artist Judith Rivers from the Waitaki Valley. 

The artist says it is aperçu, a french term to perceive or comprehend, a brief survey or sketch, a physical glimpse or intuitive insight into a topic.

At the time he painted it Cleverley was heavily influenced by Italian painter and sculptor Mimmo Paladino. 

“I used to like his work because he’d go into all the old Gothic churches and draw and paint the figurines, the papal purple stuff.

“It’s really macabre some of the statues in there, weird and medieval, they’re kind of luscious.”

Cleverley said when he was younger he used to love working to a deadline and the “agony and ecstasy” of that.

“I’d go and do a few hours painting and then I was bloody exhausted, and sometimes when things are going good, I get the shakes completing it.

“I like to finish the paintings slightly before they’re finished, so the viewer can finish them, because a painting needs to be alive, you know.”

Cleverley said there were a couple of paintings he started in 2022.

“The big oil ones I don’t fuss over them, but I do change them, sometimes, or add a bit of colour . . . but I want them as fragile and as if they might nearly fall to bits in front of your eyes.

“Pip and I have been sitting with the paintings for a year . . . she never says anything but she doesn’t have to, she can look at me and I know if she liked the painting better the day before,” he says with a laugh. 

“They’re like a song that sort of develops over a long while.”

Peter Cleverley: Dreams are Free is on at Forrester Gallery, Tarapirohe — Side Gallery from October 3, 2026 till January 24, 2027.