Peter Matthews

“My work straddles the performative and the conceptual, the experimental and process and material based inquiries into how I experience time, place, space, the sublime, the ineffable, the transient, the impermanent, the romantic, the mysterious and the poetic.”

Peter Matthew’s approach to painting is entirely unique. He does not have a permanent studio but instead works between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, making art aboard a make-shift table/floating device, spending hours in the water immersing himself with the energy from the waves and current. He records these experiences as a stream of consciousness onto the canvas. This performance-like act of painting beautifully captures the quiet solitude of Matthews’ time alone and the kinetics of the water itself. Astral was part of a new body of work where Matthews, after producing a canvas in each ocean, candidly stitches both together.