PETER PEARSON is best known for his evocative paintings of cities and architectural subjects, principally of Dublin, his native city.  He has however other strands in his painting including landscape and seascape, and an element of symbolism and the surreal are also sometimes found in his work.

Many of the city subjects depict the changing city, portraying decay, loss of identity along with haunting beauty of the older houses and buildings.  Cranes and traffic, often painted in winter light or by night are favourite features, and give the pictures a contemporary character.

Far from being merely topographical, Pearson’s pictures evoke the mood of the city and celebrate its historical symbolism and heritage issues, which the artist has been campaigning to protect for over thirty years.
His first significant solo exhibition was in Venice in 1978 where he had been studying on an Italian Government Scholarship for painting.  He has been exhibiting his work continuously ever since and his paintings are to be seen in many public and private collections.

Many of Pearson’s recent compositions are arranged from a high vantage point, such as from the top of a large buliding.  He has, for example, painted “en plein air” from the top of the Custom House, Dublin’s Civil Offices and O’Connell bridge house.  Over the past few years he has taken the high vantage point a stage further in a series of aerial views of the city and the bay.  The pattern of streets and buildings seen from the air form an exciting abstract patchwork of light and shade, structure and void.

Although conceding to a certain romantic mood in some of the paintings in this show, the presence of modernity in the form of new buildings, traffic, bridges, scaffolding  and cranes, he avoids a simply nostalgic view of Dublin and its historical places.  Pearson
celebrates the city, and records moments of contemporary life- a new bridge, a visting ship, buildings under construction.  Earlier
exhibitions recorded the relentless destruction which once blighted Dublin, for example the new pier of Greystones.

Water is a constant source of interest, and there are few paintings, which do not feature the sea, a river or some other source of water.  Ships, ports and the life of the Docks have always provided interesting subjects for Pearson’s brush.  Smoke is another element, which is often present, sometimes in the form of lurid clouds polluting the atmosphere from the industrial chimney.  The E.S.B chimneys in Dublin bay have been a favourite subject for over thirty years.  He has also painted such places as N.E.T in Arklow, which once belched sulphuric yellow clouds, and the highly industrialized port of La Havre and in this show in particular there are several studies of ports on the East Coast of Ireland.  Peter, born in Dublin 1955, is now living with his family in Co.Wexford