Peter Matthews is an English artist who specialises in creating paintings while immersed in water, often floating on, or submerged in, oceans. This timescale of this process can range from several hours to a few days. He works with art materials strapped about his person, and allows the movement of the ocean and its waves to paint his pictures for him. 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 expressionistJasper Johns. His creative process has occasionally led him into danger, and has resulted in his receiving injuries, and even catching diseases. Matthews' work has been exhibited internationally, as well as being used to illustrate aspects of scientific research in marine biology.
Background
Peter Mathews was born in 1978. Originally from Derby, he spent much of his youth exploring the countryside of Derbyshire, particularly its forests and rivers. Matthews ascribes these early hikes to his attraction to solitude. In an interview with BBC News, he described his feeling of allure to the "mysterious and omnipresent call of the wild." As an artist, however, Matthews calls Cornwall his "ancestral" home. His maternal grandfather "sold fish in Leicester," says Matthews, "so I like to think it's in my roots," on working at sea. Although he personally rejects the description of environmental artist, he has also been called an "ocean based visual artist," and on one occasion even a "mystical waterman." His work, focussed on the sea as it is, has been identified as part of a long tradition of British artists' fascination with the maritime, which includes artists as Turner and Constable.'' Andrew Friend, a contemporary of Matthews,' also takes an immersive approach to his own seascapes. Matthews original inspiration for his way of working was a 2007 near-death experience. This occurred while he was surfing off Mexico, when the sea became increasingly rough and he became separated from his surfboard. He was eventually hit by a rogue wave; by then he was "floundering in the ocean with a gut-wrenching sense of fear, being completely at the mercy of the ocean," he later recalled.
Technique
Matthews' has created his work in the earth's oceans, Cornwall, Hawaii, and Taiwan. In doing so, he can spend long periods—ranging from hours to days— floating or submerging in the ocean. He keeps his artistic media either cached in his hat or strapped to his wrists or ankles. This includes charcoal and gel pens, and the surfaces he draws on can range from paper to canvas sheeting, pinned to "old piece of plywood" which acts both as a drawing board and a floatation device. Working this way, it has been said, helps Matthews try and capture the state of suspension people feel while they are bobbing in the water. This methood also allows him to explore—in his words—"the fluid midpoint between sea and land, thought and form." Matthews often enters the water at dawn and may stay immersed until nightfall, and effectively "lets the ocean do the work for him"; sometimes the work is left exposed to the elements and tides overnight in which the piece continues its natural development. Matthews has described himself as merely being the "instrument" by which the sea "draw itself." Matthews' work has itself encountered danger, having been buried on a beach by a mudslide and on other occasions being swept away or sinking in the sea. Problems Matthews personally faces are those of his environment—he has suffered numbness, hypothermia and sunstroke, as well as receiving dog-, snake-, jellyfish- and insect-bites. As a result, his working method has been described "eccentric." To get himself in the mindset to create the piece entitled With the Forces of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, Matthews constructed a speaker system out of a CD player and a tripod. He then played himself recordings of the sound of the Pacific Ocean over a period of days, floating in the Atlantic Ocean. On one occasion Matthews submerged himself to the ocean bed where he used waterproof ink on canvasses weighted down with rocks, whilst, when in California, he slept in the Californian desert and painted with "one of the blackest paints on Earth."
