Peter James Smith
b. 1954
Resides Melbourne, Australia
In a uniquely informative style, Peter James Smith successfully overlays his expressive realist landscape paintings with mathematical data and scientific research, creating works rich in narrative and meaning. Counting the waves of the sea, painted specifically for the Southward exhibition, is ‘(a) painting of the north end of Macquarie Island with an overlay of tides and wave frequency data recorded from late May 2026. The power of the painting hopefully throws out a challenge to science, and this is ironically recorded in the title.’
Peter retired in 2009, from dual roles as Professor of Mathematics and Art and Head of the School of Creative Media at RMIT University in Melbourne, and was awarded the Antarctic New Zealand Visiting Artist Fellow, spending a summer at Scott Base during 2009/2010. In an interview regarding his work in 2016, Peter says ‘(m)y current practice embraces the traditional painting approaches of oil on linen in a realist style that is at once traditional and contemporary: traditional, in the sense of my fertile interest in the 19th Century High German Romantic paintings of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) or the American Luminists such as Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900); contemporary, in my embrace of contemporaneity – the linking of images and texts from different times, cultures, knowledge systems, histories and geographic locations – to a painted constellation in the present.’
Born in Northland in 1954, Peter moved to Australia in 1980; a now widely-published mathematician, and well-exhibited artist with over 70 solo and 100 group exhibitions in New Zealand, Australia and internationally, Peter holds a PhD in statistical modelling from the University of Western Australia and a Master of Fine Art in painting from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. His paintings are held in many public, private and corporate collections within Aotearoa and Australia.