Biography

Peter James Smith is quintessentially a New Zealand painter of black grounds, dark landscape and evening skies shot with fading sunlight. His practice is built from the traditional painting medium of oil on linen, and this same painting process is now extending to installation, and painted objects. He is widely published as a professional mathematician and holds the degrees BSc (Hons), MSc, PhD with a Master of Fine Art in Painting. He is Professor of Mathematics and Art at RMIT University, Melbourne, and has held more than 50 solo shows and participated in many group exhibitions and has curated exhibitions throughout New Zealand and Australia. His work is represented in many public, private and corporate collections in New Zealand, Australia and internationally. 

Smith has always linked the culture of science and of human experience through a considered use of data, reasoning and poetic image. This is characterised by a simultaneous use of image, text and strong intuitive mark making, often in overlay, or underlay. "…Or is science under-lapped by intuition, pure and/or aesthetic? Or is the point just that, in Smith’s work, the picture is under the inscription?" (Patrick Hutchings, Number is the Wisest Thing, Underlapping Science exhibition catalogue, 2001).

Resonant still life and landscape images are juxtaposed with mathematical, astronomical, poetic and historical observations in the painted images. This is intended to invoke a sense of longing, to gather echoes of the past, to mine the passage of history, and to bring it forward to the currency of the lived moment. Mark making has always been an important part of this intention. Handwritten citations, truncated notes, active jottings, scientific diagrams and blackboard erasures float on the loosely painted surfaces of stretched linen, paper collage and, more recently, found objects. The objects are chosen, indeed collected, so as to be carriers of an authentic history. The painted mathematical texts are often quoted from Smith’s experiences as a mathematician. He draws them with an uninhibited beauty that still engages even when the mathematics is not understood by the viewer:

"…As a painter and mathematician with a lifelong affiliation to blackboards and the revelatory mathematical explanation… I paint equations from the inside, on the cusp of their development. This includes the crossings out, and the blackboard erasures for the brick walls and blind alleys of failed proofs." (Peter James Smith, Truth + Beauty, exhibition catalogue, 2006).

"His super-real paintings set against dark grounds have been accurately described as ‘cinematic’ in their use of sequential images in which their text and imagery is illuminated as though projected onto a screen. In their precision, they reflect the work of his other career as a mathematician." (McCulloch, Alan & Susan, & McCulloch Childs, Emily, The New McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art, The Miegunyah Press, 2006).

Visit artist homepage:
 http://peterjamessmith.net/main/