Peter Matthews

A Journey Through a Pacific Ocean Storm

2012-2013. Enamel, acrylic, sand and found jetsam from Pacific Ocean on canvas. 5 paintings in series, one painting lost in the Pacific Ocean. Approximately 2 meters x 2 meters.

To challenge the relationship of making a painting during a Pacific Ocean storm on the coast of Taiwan. To flow in silence with an amplified sense of spatial and material awareness towards a direct pursuit to reveal and find something about the physical dynamics of the ocean and universe while leaving parts of the painting out there, lost and circulating with time in the subject.  To challenge the relationship between object and subject by taking the object of a canvas into the subject where the subject, the ocean, works in a parallel collaboration with myself in the image making process and journeying dialogue.

To take a painting somewhere where it has not been before, over a period of 8 days working in the intertidal spaces of the ocean and simultaneously taking, saturating and immersing the painting in the ocean.  That a painting can go somewhere a drawing cannot reach. Somewhere farther and deeper out there.

Painting and working in the wake of a typhoon, the Pacific Ocean, Taiwan.