PETER JAMES SMITH

The current ongoing series of paintings, Line of Sight, is an examination of landscape, place and its relation to the history of that place—this relationship arcs like the tracery of a dotted line—forming a bridge that stretches from where we stand looking in a landscape towards the horizon of history, of scientific and cultural knowledge. The works in this series are an attempt to construct meaning at that time/place nexus using texts in white oil paint overlaid on the painted surface of both paintings and sculptures.

‘The texts are reprised from diverse sources in a post-modernist tradition. They draw on my time as a professional mathematician writing descriptive formulae on blackboards; they draw on a love of poetry and historical moment; and in this exhibition, they draw on aboriginal history through footprint trackways at Lake Mungo near the Victoria/NSW border. So the texts are cultural constructs of meaning. Then clearly (as Lake Mungo has been mentioned) there is the specificity of the general notion of “landscape”. It is the landscape that watches over a specific place. It endures. It enfolds the past. It hides past events and lost causes. It slowly covers over tracks like the murderer cleaning up the scene of the perfect crime.

‘Beyond place and text, there is the actual application of paint. My current practice embraces the traditional painting approaches of oil on linen in a realist style that is at once traditional and contemporary: traditional, in the sense of my fertile interest in the 19th Century High German Romantic paintings of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) or the American Luminists such as Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900); contemporary, in my embrace of contemporaneity—the linking of images and texts from different times, cultures, knowledge systems, histories and geographic locations—to a painted constellation in the present.’ PJS, 2016.