Monthly Meeting & Demo with Peter Smales | 3 February 2025

Art Tuition:

Peter Smales was born in London in 1958 and arrived in Australia in 1966.  Peter began painting in his early teens and has been painting full-time since 1987.  He lectured in Painting and Drawing at Melbourne University from 1986 to 1988. 

Drawing his inspiration from nature, his paintings are principally known for their rich colours, captured moods and impressionistic effects. 

Artist’s Statement

My art is fixed firmly in the visual world and paint is the medium I have chosen to express myself.  Taking Paul Cezanne’s dictum that “art is a return to nature, but not to be taken at face value” – art , artifice, artful – the word implies a contrivance and selection.  The four sides of a painting, not found in nature, impose all the conventions that have been adopted by artists over time – the two dimensional decorative abstract and colour possibilities.

Changing light, of beguiling subtlety, falling on objects provides endless and inexhaustible motifs.  In the end a painting is paint, not reality.  I like paint and I want the end product to look something like the subject and something like paint.  That’s the hook – an art for art’s sake aesthetic.

Background:

Peter Smales was born in London in 1958 and arrived in Australia in 1966.  Peter began painting in his early teens and has been painting full-time since 1987.  He lectured in Painting and Drawing at Melbourne University from 1986 to 1988. 

Drawing his inspiration from nature, his paintings are principally known for their rich colours, captured moods and impressionistic effects.