#61. Peter Clossick ~ Figurative Expressionist Painter

Peter Clossick is one of those painters who found the direction of their art early on, a revelatory moment on Hampstead Heath one evening after a day drawing in a shoe design studio in Mayfair, when "looking at a tree and feeling the world, grass, people, the wind, I knew I could draw it as I designed, in a cliched way. But I wanted to draw as I experienced. Which was totally different and the existential question then became how do I approach this thinking and feeling, which became a tactile reaching out into haptic contact. It was my first insight. The years that followed as he returned to art school in the mid-70s, Camberwell, fortunately for him at that time a rare bastion of the Bomberg/Coldstream tradition (colloquially known as the Bombstream') that runs through Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Lucian Freud even to the present day, reinforced that insight, his almost sculptural use of paint an equivalence of matter set against the physical realities of the people, rooms, still-lifes and occasional landscapes he was painting.