Peter Matthews

Paintings from the Pacific Ocean, Chile and the Atlantic Ocean, England

2017-2018

These paintings were produced after a four month period of time painting in and along the Pacific coast of Chile, along the Atacama desert, and then sewed together with paintings on canvas made along the Atlantic coast of England in an Indian summer in late 2017.

The paintings are individually sewn together by hand on the Atlantic coast. Each painting is made from two pieces of canvas which come from those experiences over four months painting in two oceans. The works explore highly emotional and spiritual experiences with presence and absence, time and place, space, movement, change, light and environment. Sewn together over hours and hours and featuring appliqué techniques of incorporating found objects into the painting, the works stand at a major junction in my development of ideas and relationships with how to make an image over long periods of time in nature, the visceral record and trace of journeying alone in search of the sublime and the transcendental, and pushing further with the contemporary nature of painting in a world which is always changing and in a dynamic state of flux.

Installation views from the solo show The End Is Where They Start From, Montoya, Barcelona, March 2018,  and the group show No Man Is an Island at the Künstlerforum Bonn, Germany, April, 2018.

Photography by Álvaro Valdecantos and Cynthia Rüehmekorf.