Peter Darach: the painter who lived in his dreams: Paintings & Works on Paper

‘The surface belies the content; the high formalized, the unspontaneous, are oddly wedded here to the sense of the artist conjuring his figures out of an inner darkness.’ — Timothy Hyman, writing about Peter Darach in Artscribe, 1983.

Peter Darach spent his life searching for the underworld. The pull of subconscious urges, visceral images and unusual iconography populate his work; serving as portals to Darach’s mental hinterland. Dreams and memories resurface in his oils, shaping a style that turns figuration into a form of psychological exorcism. 

Opening on September 16th an exhibition at Brooke-Walder Gallery explores Darach’s lifelong preoccupation with myth, memory and dreams.  

Born in Derbyshire in 1940, Darach trained at the Royal College of Art (RCA) and exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts alongside some of the most interesting figurative painters of his generation. He was selected for the John Moores Painting Prize and later the Jerwood Drawing Prize.

Years later the enigmatic artist attributed his artistic calling to vivid dreams he had as a boy. “The reason I paint pictures is because of a dream I had [as] a child,” Darach wrote. “Each night for quite a long time (many weeks) - I was inexorably drawn towards the entrance to the underworld - my experiences there shaped my life.”

That netherworld lay under a ruined stable on a piece of wasteland called DeVases in Darach’s native village of Spondon. The remnants of Field House, the former home of the Devas family, were frequently occupied by roaming children “armed to the teeth”. These centuries-old ruins standing as gothic mementos, carrying the ghostly imprint of former inhabitants, clearly left an indelible mark on the artist.

An Unconventional Artist

Despite his obvious talent —  the art critic Timothy Hyman called Darach “among the most interesting painters of his generation” — he lived and worked on the margins. Defying conventional expectations Darach had little time for self-promotion and the networking commitments that fuel the commercial art machine.“I can’t go out and hustle agents and buyers,” he told the Derby Evening Telegraph in 1970.

Carel Weight, his tutor at the RCA, asked him to write something about his family as part of the process to become a Royal Academician. He refused, regarding the exercise as ‘a trap’ that impinged on his freedom. 

Before anything Darach was a diligent, committed artist. Making art was his calling. In September 1969 he “gave up a well-paid job" at Oxford School of Architecture and Manchester School of Art to become a full time painter. He lived and worked in an empty corner-shop in Battersea, at risk of slum clearance, supported financially by his first wife Maureen, a teacher.
In 1969 while camping on the Isle of Skye they bought a croft in Sconser, overlooking the arcadian waters of Loch Sligahan, which Peter renovated and extended. Two years after separating from Maureen he met Anne Marie Dinwiddie, who was working at Sconser Lodge during her university summer break. Anne moved into the studio in Battersea.

In 1975 when Anne was pregnant with their first child, Timothy, she changed her surname to Darach, inspired by a local stream on Skye called Allt Darach. Peter, formerly Millband, adopted the name Darach in 1977.

British Art Revisited

Darach’s stubborn refusal to explain his work has only burnished his mystique. Elusive and mysterious he remains a compelling figure who worked at a formative time in British art. Arriving at the RCA in the early 60s he came of age at a time when the craft of painting was being deconstructed, rethought, in some cases: rejected outright.

Abstraction was all the rage, influenced by developments in America and continental Europe, while a younger generation were experimenting with Pop, Minimalism and, increasingly, conceptual art. Painting didn’t have to capture the visible; increasingly it belonged to the realm of ideas.  

In his introduction to Young Britain: The New Scene, an exhibition at Sears Vincent Price Gallery in 1967 that showcased Darach’s work — at that time he was still Peter Millband — Roland Penrose captured the spirit of the period. ‘Like the majority of artists at the present time, none of the young British painters exhibited here is interested in a photographic copy of the world seen around us,’ he wrote. Instead, Penrose said, Darach and his fellow exhibitors were striving to ‘establish a new language which is still part of the vast vocabulary of painting’.
Like other postwar artists Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and R.B. Kitaj Darach never gave up on the human figure. He had a lifelong interest in Japanese prints, becoming an enthusiastic collector of shunga, the sexually explicit woodblock prints produced during the Edo period.

As he aged his oils became more crowded, surreal and carnivalesque. Figures coalesce and congeal, twisting and contorting. Themes of mortality, dreams, sex, and family and friendship reoccur. Darach remains an enigma, but there is no denying he had a whole world inside of him. 

Peter Darach: The Painter Who Lived in His Dreams runs September 16th — October 2nd. Brooke-Walder Gallery, 2nd floor,15 Duke Street, St James’s.

EXHIBITIONS

• 2025  A process of Individuation, Brooke-Walder Gallery, London
• 2017 Peter  Darach, Megan Piper, London
• 2016 Inside Out, Castleford Gallery, Manchester *
• 1997 Jerwood Drawing Prize, (award) *
• 1995 John Moores Painting Prize, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (award) *
• 1983 Peter Darach: Me and My Family, Artspace Gallery, Aberdeen (toured to Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow and Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne)
• 1979 Narrative Paintings: Figurative Art of Two Generations selected by Timothy Hyman, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (toured to Arnolfini, Bristol) *
• 1965 Four Young Artists, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London *
• 1963 John Moores Painting Prize, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool *

 (* denotes a group exhibition)