Extracts from an Essay by Gary Topp 2009

“Peter Joyce (b.1964, Poole, England) is a scientist, social historian, archaeologist, cartographer and naturalist. His paintings are immediately beautiful and almost ridiculously complicated. His biggest struggle is always how much information to leave out – that is why they are always scratched and erased. They are always scratched and erased. “

“His journey in and out of the world around him keeps the work fresh and full of endless discovery. This should not be surprising because it is this modest approach that gives the work its integrity. Peter wants us to understand what he is looking at, he wants to share it and hold your hand as he travels. When you go walking with Peter he tells you everything he sees. Then he goes and paints it. “

“In Purbeck Peter must have visited the quarries, current and historic, hundreds of times. He befriended the quarrymen and stole lumps of quarried stone and placed them as sculpture in his home; he worried about the economic decline and envied the texture of their hands and faces. Peter is a labourer. It has long been my belief that Peter’s real fascination is human industry - particularly the transformation of natural elements inherent in quarrying. His paintings are ‘alchemy’writ large. In Bouin, France not only are the marshes entirely constructed, and held in by the insidious digue wall, they were created to facilitate another intervention. Instead of the quarried stone of Purbeck it is ‘les coquillage’– sea food. Mussels, clams, oysters and many more. The fact that it is also a salt factory adds a mineral element to the abundance. Salt of the earth. “

“So he is, despite the obvious first impressions, more a painter of human endeavour than an illustrator of the natural world. It is the ‘created’ world that compels him. Peter makes paintings, layer by layer, colour by colour, piece of information by piece of information. He is, despite the abstraction, entirely literal, utterly an illustrator. “

Extract from ‘Marks of Passage’ Exhibition Catalogue 2017 by Dr. Ian Massey

“To some extent the artist’s methods are analogous to those of a sculptor, for his process centres not only on painting per se, but also on a form of pictorial construction in which a predilection for textural surfaces – the haptic aspect of the work – is crucial. It is achieved by gradually coercing materials into shape and effect, via accretion, revision and assimilation, in what Joyce describes as ‘working on a 2D surface and fighting against it all the time.’ He talks of ‘taking the sexiness out’ of a distractingly delectable passage of paint, by scraping it away or working over it, so that it does not undermine the development of the whole. There is a muscularity in the work, especially apparent in the greater formal complexity of the larger paintings. It can be found also in the deployment of line, specifically in tightly controlled, tensile lines, which as they flex and alter direction can both animate and contain whilst serving also as compositional anchorage. These lines are sometimes finely inscribed, others made by excavating the surface, scraping into it to form bands comprised of underlying paint layers. “

Extracts from ‘Digging Deep’ Exhibition Catalogue 2019 by Sue Hubbard

“Joyce is a painter of landscapes but they’re landscapes of the imagination, arrived at through perpetual looking, rather than direct representations of the actual world. The painter to whom he is closest is Prunella Clough. Her subtle translations of the everyday – the detritus and incidentals caught out of the corner of the eye – are mirrored in Joyce’s work. Like hers, his colours are muted and rooted in nature. Shades and tones that might be seen on his frequent walks. The silvery greens of lichen on a gate. The ochre or verdigris of a rusty fence. Never simply decorative, they could be pigments dug straight from the earth. This chthonic connection explains his passion for collecting ceramics, themselves made from that most basic of elements, clay. He and Jo have a fine collection”

“The process of mapping, first explored as a young boy, is suggested in a number of Joyce’s adult paintings. It’s both a psychological and metaphorical device, as well as a way of attempting to describe the experience of being in the actual, physical landscape. Being a cartographer is to be an explorer in the unknown land of the creative imagination. In the final decade of the nineteenth century Freud articulated the first ideas about the unconscious using words derived from topos (place), implying a sense both of location and investigation. Like Freud, Joyce has an interest in archaeology. The process of digging deep though ancient layers, of uncovering what is hidden, implies the search for new ways of seeing. Joyce’s paintings are about quiet discoveries.”

To read the full essays and view the exhibition catalogues visit Publications