Traces of the unseen and the transient

On sunny days, while waiting for the train Peter S. Smith draws his shadow as it extends across the station. He constructs these drawings by sketching the outline in a couple of minutes while waiting for the train before adding the tone over the course of the journey. This daily drawing practice keeps him 'visually fit' while also providing inspiration for engravings and, more recently, paintings.

As Simon Brett has written Smith 'has always been one of the few artists to use wood engraving for a truly personal and genuinely contemporary vision, untrammelled by even the best conventions of the medium.' The paintings, drawings and prints that he recently showed at One Paved Court displayed playful and profound engagements with these shadow effects in work that combined abstract patterning, figurative representation of shadows and platform furniture with traces of the unseen and the transient.

The exhibition reflected Peter's his interest in normal everyday experiences and the ways that these can be transformed by the materials, processes and metaphors of a shared visual language.

Peter S Smith is a Painter/Printmaker with a studio at the St Bride Foundation in London. He studied Fine Art at Birmingham Polytechnic and Art Education at Manchester. In 1992 he gained an MA (Printmaking) at Wimbledon School of Art. Examples of his work can be found in private and public collections including Tate Britain and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. His book 'The Way See It' (Piquant Press) is a visual monograph of contemporary work by a professional artist who is a Christian, which provides an illustrated introduction to the art of engraving. Simon Brett explains that Peter was: 'among a group of like-minded young artists who sat at the feet of the Dutch Calvinist art historian Hans Rookmaaker. Rookmaaker (1922-77), himself part of Francis Schaeffer's evangelical L'Abri movement, brought a deep understanding of contemporary art to bear on what a Christian might do in what then seemed like cultural end-times.'

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers and a Member of the Society of Wood Engravers. His work is held in many private and public collections including, Tate Britain; The Ashmolean, Oxford; The Fitzwilliam, Cambridge; The Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and The Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Canada.

Simon Brett, in reviewing ‘The Way I See It’, said: 'Peter’s wood engravings and etchings are so much expressions of the identical sensibility, rather than exercises in contrasted media, that they subliminally make one think of him not as a wood engraver or an etcher as such, at all, but as a printmaker and an artist. Not all wood engravers achieve that, let alone effortlessly. He has done his printmaking MA, he knows all about techniques but he never succumbs to the flash or relies on the technically accomplished. He keeps his work and us always on the edge.'

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