PETER ATKINS

Peter Atkins’s new works tap into the core fundamentals of jazz - intuition, composition, appropriation, arrangement, spontaneity and, in particular, improvisation. Atkins manipulates original jazz album covers by enlarging, flipping, distorting and adding various elements from a range of divergent sources including cassettes and book covers to create newly composed images that personify the ethos of the ‘Jazz Age’.

Atkins highlights his choice of canvas, using old painter’s drop sheets and tarpaulin as the field for his paintings. The stitching, paint stains, splatters and imperfections provide a readymade narrative that converges with the painted image, thus adding further layers to the work. The result is a series of paintings that defy categorization. Just as great jazz moments are realized, the works in Jazz contain elements that are real and imagined, abstract and figurative - as if existing only as a series of moments composed in space and time.

As the legendary Dave Brubeck once stated “There’s a way of playing safe, there’s a way of using tricks and there’s the way I like to play, which is dangerously, where you’re going to take a chance.... in order to create something you haven’t created before.”