Peter Matthews, Between the Ocean, the Sky and Ourselves

About

How can painting deal with climate change? Peter Matthews’ work may look abstract, but a deep involvement with the environment is built into its making. Not for him the hermetic concentration of the studio: he works at the edge of the world’s oceans with the materials he can carry on his back, his canvas often doubling up as sunscreen, roof or hammock. Matthews lives with and through his paintings, working on large spreads of unprimed canvas using sticks and stones more than brushes. Sometimes he’ll dive to the bottom of the ocean with a canvas, barely able to see what he’s doing; and his drawings are also made underwater so that, as Peter puts it, ‘the sea is depicting the sea itself’. All manner of coastal materials – shells, sand, and litter – may find their way onto his paintings as he records what he experiences in a stream-of-consciousness manner. Moreover, Peter’s ‘making of’ film – shown alongside the paintings - puts us right there with him…

Matthews’ paintings enact something we evidently need more of: a balance between man and nature. As Peter explains, he is interested in exploring where things organically go in the depths of solitude, not as an anti-social stance but because he seeks ‘those places to be alone in nature, where everything seems in synch again… It is all about straddling chance, a communion and dialogue with nature and my spiritual self’. That may remind us of the landscape painting tradition of the ‘romantic sublime’, of the limitless or incomprehensible aspects of the natural world inspiring awe through their sheer magnitude. Where Caspar David Friedrich’s work positions the artist as a spectator of nature, Matthews is a participant - but the impulse is similar. Peter says that, for him, ‘the experience of the sublime is when we submit ourselves, physically, emotionally, mentally, to something beyond and greater than ourselves, and this is why I work in and with the ocean’.