Originally studying art in Brighton, Peter Wright has lived in Cornwall for the past 24 years in a deeply rural setting just outside the village of Stithians near Truro. His studio and workshops have been converted from old stone farm buildings, one of which was originally a low, slate roofed pig shed. All the figurative work on this site was painted or drawn from life, while the sculpture and architectural ceramics are all produced from original drawings from life. Most of the work on display is for sale. For more information or to leave your comments on this website, please go to the Sales page and the Contact page.

Paintings

All the work on this website is recent but varies in style and content. Colour in these works is as important a factor in the composition as the form, and it is in the language of colour that intuitive, creative ideas are expressed. Paintings are in all media but most of the work is in Gouache, painted on heavy 300 lb acid free, cotton rag, mould made paper.

Drawings

Drawings are made in a number of media including ink, conte and coloured chalk, on paper of the best heavy quality cartridge or on tinted pastel paper.

Ceramics and Sculpture

Peter Wright has completed public commissions in hospitals, commercial retail sites and in social housing projects. While sculptures and a few ceramic pieces are still available, commissions for ceramic works can no longer be accepted.

A brief reason for drawing:

“In a sense one can say that drawing is the most fundamentally spiritual - i.e. completely subjective - of all visual artistic activities. Nature presents our eyes with coloured surfaces to which painted areas of pigment may correspond, and with inflected surfaces to which sculptural surfaces may correspond. But nowhere does it present our eyes with the lines and the relationships between lines which are the raw material of drawing. For a drawing's basic ingredients are strokes or marks which have a symbolic relationship with experience, not a direct, overall similarity with anything real. And the relationships between marks, which embody the main meaning of a drawing, can only be read into the marks by the spectator, so as to create their own mode of truth” (1).

Drawing for me is a way of getting to grips with what's out there in the 'real' world. I hope it doesn't sound too pretentious if I say that a successful drawing is one that has “condensed our visual experience of what it is to BE” (2). By drawing a person, a landscape, a pot, you not only become more visually aware, but in closer contact with the world you inhabit. I know that I have understood very little about something as commonplace as a cup, until I have made some drawings of it. The crisp, detailed 'reality' we see is only an illusion. What we 'see' is a model in our brain that we project onto the world. It is not until you try to draw your own familiar cup that you realize you have hardly seen it before.

A drawing is also like a meditation. By concentrating the mind on this one single thing and this one activity, cutting out all other thought of stimulus, you are in a true meditative state. (By concentrating on the sensation of his breath, the Buddha is said to have obtained enlightenment under the Bodi tree.)

BUT, a drawing is also the subjective result of our own experience, not an objective truth. It is “a truth not of abstract concepts but of visual conviction” (3).  To successfully communicate with others by drawing, the subjective analysis of our own 'reality' in the form of a two dimensional image has to conform to certain accepted conventions of visual principles or 'rules' that enable it to be 'understood' by the third party. Where the rules are inadequate the artist has to extend them, develop them, or even invent new ones. (It can take a long time before new principles of drawing and 'seeing' are accepted and understood by the general public, e.g. Cubism.)

Above all, the act of drawing gives me deep pleasure.

(1, 2, & 3 - Philip Rawson, 'Drawing', Oxford University Press.)