I work alone along the coasts of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. I have been doing so since 2007 when I started drawing directly in the Pacific in Mexico after a near death experience while surfing. Immersion with the ocean and nature is central to my practice, as is the notion and experience of the journey. I do not work in a studio. 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. I work directly with the mystical elements, dimensions and truths that shape and inform our experience and understanding of who and where we are in the universe. I work across different ways of image making and continuously discover that a drawing can take me to places that a painting cannot while, similarly, video may be more susceptible to capturing something that drawing, even after hours and hours drifting in the ocean, may elude. My process of working in solitude in the ocean is defined and informed by the poetic blending of rituals, dreams, the spirit world, chanting, intuition, superstition, the paranormal and the diversity of fringe and earth sciences while moving and responding to what is happening in our contemporary world. Since 2016, I have been taking my paintings to a larger scale and incorporating found objects into the making process, visually and materially, and also sewing pieces and fragments of paintings made in different countries and ocean bodies together into one painting. - Peter Matthews (born October, 1978) is an English artist who has developed a practice of creating drawings while immersed in the ocean and paintings created over days or weeks of being in solitude along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. He works with art materials hiked into the landscape, strapped about his person, hidden in caches along the coast and using found objects on the beach. Since 2007, his drawings made directly in the ocean record the movement of the ocean, the passage and experience of time and the live natural environment that he immerses himself into, often straddling a degree of vulnerability to his being in the process. His work is known as being produced as a lived experience while in nature alone, and he has worked in a diverse range of natural environments in México, Japan, Chile, Costa Rica, England, the U.S., Brazil and Taiwan. He has been identified as being part of a long English tradition of maritime art, whilst his abstract style has been compared to that of American expressionist Jasper Johns. His creative process has occasionally led him into danger, and...
