Peter Gelf

Peter Gelf

Peter Gelf is a painter.

He is interested in the relationship between people and their context.

Another work in progress. I promise I will post the previous WIPs when (if) they’re finished. This one is being a bit of a challenge. I’m working on this at the moment. It’s been more challenging than it should have been: I’ve had fundamentally to rework it three times. It’s because I put aside my normal process and just started playing on the canvas. It turns out that the “boring” planning and fundamentals stages I would normally follow are quite important - not only to the end result but to whether I enjoy the journey. In the end I scraped it right back and treated what was left as the preliminary sketch. I’m not sure it’s done but I’m going to come back to it another time. We have just left the Ile de Re, a lovely place. Here’s another small sketch, in acrylics again. Another useful exercise. Though I prefer painting with oils, and find acrylics lack juiciness, acrylics can do things oils can’t do. It’s also good to work out how to represent figuratively a subject (in this case a beach) which has limited figurative reference points. That was the question I tried to answer: how do you show the truth about a beach pebble tower? Not easy do in circa 10x7cm. And not wholly successful: to create interest, the colours have allowed themselves to become a little gaudy. And the detail has become both distracting and unconvincing. Today’s sketch on Ile de Re, France. A technical exercise, this one: a still life of pebbles, on a wooden chopping board. Not easy to get stones to look like stones, or cut wood to look like wood. As I painted, the sky changed from dull grey to full sun, so all the colours moved about. Acrylic again, because that’s what I have with me. Clear skies on the Ile de Re at the moment. I’m sketching in the sun. With acrylics, unusually, because they’re more portable. Though this one has more of a watercolour flavour. Possible candidate for a bigger piece perhaps. The Empty Pushchair. A small work, oil on board, completed this summer. Again, I’m dwelling on the extraordinary in the everyday; the interplay between people, and between people and things; and on the relationship between focusing (which is essentially subjective) and truth (which purports to be objective). Here’s another recent piece, Man on a Train (1). I’m trying to sort out how the banal (being on a train) can sit so closely with the utterly extraordinary (that trains exist and we get to go on them). And how we sit with strangers in our shared and separate space. And the relationship between loneliness and resonance with others. And just - well just being in a train. This is what I’m painting at the moment - Man on a Train 2 - a work in progress. I’m often playing with with the three body problem, the unpredictability of three or more interacting entities: in this case train/woman/man and the viewer’s values. Also, in how to paint a person that is both specific and generic - not (in this case) a portrait of a particular person but a representation that has the quality of truth without having to have a name. This is At the Table, from the recent Aberystwyth exhibition; a small oil on board piece that I’m particularly pleased with. It’s looking at the pattern of the people, and their connections, and their relationship with their immediate environs - but it’s for the viewer to complete the specifics, to resolve the story. The mark making is showing the combined confidence and looseness that I’ve been working on.