Peter Hudson is a Sunshine Coast based artist who draws largely on contemporary Australian history for inspiration in his art.
Hudson exhibits regularly at State and National Institutional galleries and is represented in numerous institutional collections including the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Parliament House, Brisbane, and the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra.
In 2022 Peter Hudson was invited to participate in the ‘Wrestlemania’ exhibition at the Rockhampton Museum of Art.
‘When I was in my early teens World Championship Wrestling landed on our TVs like a bombshell. The flamboyant, wild, wrestling stars immediately became our heroes. When the bell rang to start the action, we backed our favourite warrior and willed him on to win the match using his unique killer move, which could be the butcher’s axe, the flying scissors, the atomic drop or maybe the brain buster! We adored it and couldn't get enough of it.
Moving forward quite a few years, my brother-in-law introduced me to Sumo wrestling.
Sumo wrestlers are also huge, dangerous, and flamboyant, and just like the WCW wrestlers they are idolised and loved by their fans. A Sumo match is as exciting and entertaining as a WCW match, however very different, in that a battle could be over in a few seconds, and both wrestlers and audience follow strict cultural, historical, and ceremonial protocol.
My drawings are based on these differences.
Jackson Pollock said, 'a painting must say something, and be good to look at'. I'm sure most artists would agree, so we wrestle with this every day’.
