Peter Matthews (artist)

Peter Matthews (born October, 1978) is an English artist who has developed a practice of creating drawings while immersed in the ocean and paintings created over days or weeks of being in solitude along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. He works with art materials hiked into the landscape, strapped about his person, hidden in caches along the coast and using found objects on the beach. Since 2007, his drawings made directly in the ocean record the movement of the ocean, the passage and experience of time and the live natural environment that he immerses himself into, often straddling a degree of vulnerability to his being in the process. His work is known as being produced as a lived experience while in nature alone, and he has worked in a diverse range of natural environments in México, Japan, Chile, Costa Rica, England, the U.S., Brazil and Taiwan. He has been identified as being part of a long English tradition of maritime art, whilst his abstract style has been compared to that of American expressionist Jasper Johns. His creative process has occasionally led him into danger, and has resulted in his receiving injuries. Matthews' work has been exhibited internationally, as well as being used to illustrate aspects of scientific research in marine biology.