Peter James Smith’s paintings reflect his wide interests in science, culture and history, all of which coalesce into his distinctive paintings and assemblages – carefully inscribed with relevant and revealing lines from poetry, mathematics and scientific diagrams. His paintings marry the Romantic with the rational using the vernacular of science to create an utterly distinctive personal style. Smith is widely published as a mathematician and holds the degrees BSc (Hons), MSc, PhD with a MFA in painting and he brings a wealth of curiosity and enthusiasm to every endeavour.

Until his retirement to full-time painting in 2010, Peter James Smith held dual roles as Professor of Mathematics and Art and Head of the School of Creative Media at RMIT University. He was awarded a residency at Scott Base, Antarctica, in January 2010 as an Antarctic New Zealand Artist Fellow. He has held more than 60 solo exhibitions and his paintings are held in public, private and corporate collections in New Zealand and Australia including The University of Melbourne, RMIT University, La Trobe University, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Gippsland Regional Gallery, Victoria, and the BHP Billiton Collection.

In discussion about his work in 2016, PJS wrote: “My 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.”

Peter James Smith was born in New Zealand in 1954. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

available works