Artist Peter Messer exhibiting at Lewes gallery

After successful solo exhibitions at the Star Brewery Gallery, You Drink a Bit and Watch the Ghosts in 2020 and Quiet Times Close To Home in 2022, Peter now returns with a new collection of tempera paintings.

“Having spent so long painting the intimate details of my home town, I felt that I needed to move into some differently structured and nuanced spaces. The paintings in this exhibition contain many references to woodland, some actual and some less so. It has been a fascinating and liberating lateral step which has allowed me to pull many psychic loose ends together.

“I will never be a plein air painter, neither do I especially share the current literary enthusiasm for reconnection with the natural world. I grew up playing and dreaming in the woods over the road from my childhood home and now, in these paintings, I am simply revisiting, seeking and making similar playgrounds. For the time being.”

Born in 1954, Peter Messer studied fine art at the University of Brighton. He works mainly in egg tempera on a traditional gesso ground and has exhibited in solo and group shows in the UK, US, Germany and France.

His work is frequently exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and the New English Art Club and he has been a finalist in the Hunting, Garrick Milne, Lyn Painter-Stainers and Singer and Friedlander Prize exhibitions. In 1998 he won the Sotheby's sponsored Chichester Art Prize and in 2000 was commissioned to provide twelve paintings for the Sussex Book of Revelations, an Arts Council Millennium Project which toured Sussex libraries. In 2004 he completed a commission for the House of Lords, On The Way To Work. The Lewes Paintings Of Peter Messer was published in 2007. A Thin Place in Lewes, Castle Banks to Castle Lane was published in 2021 He lives in Lewes and has paintings in collections in Belgium, France, Germany, Holland, Spain, Norway, Sweden and the US, as well as the UK.