Peter Nuttall was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, on the 12th March 1943. He attended Maidstone College of Art, transferring from the Painting to the Sculpture School, where Elisabeth Frink was a tutor and a strong influence. In Maidstone he met and married his wife Pam and they moved to Cambridge in 1966. He was at this time already experimenting with his distinctive medium of conte and inks on paper, which established a link between sculpture and painting ever-present in his work: many of his paintings look like sculpture. Local exhibitions have included Cambridge Union Society, The Leigh Gallery, and several shows at the Old Fire Engine House in Ely, Kings College and C.C.A. Galleries. He has shared exhibitions many times locally with the painter Walt Turton (also a Blackburn man) and twice with sculptor Michael Gillespie.
In 1972, the Nuttalls moved with their four children to Swavesey, where Pam teaches at the local primary school. Since the late sixties Peter has often generated income by travelling Cambridge and surrounding villages selling paintings door-to-door from a portfolio: he has found this to be generally appreciated as well as giving access to a market that wouldn`t otherwise exist.
In London, Peter has exhibited at The Fieldbourne Galleries, St. Johns Wood, and the O`Hana Gallery. He has illustrated two books for Oleander Press: `Enlightenment Through the Art of Basketball` and `Forgotten Games.` Critic and academic George Steiner wrote the following in an introduction to Peter`s Fieldbourne Galleries brochure:
There are some obvious things to be said about the very personal art of Peter Nuttall. It is related to Surrealism, to the lucid inner landscapes and echoing cities of di Chirico.It is also a Baroque art in the proper sense, the monumental line holding - but just holding - under pressure of tensed, exuberant form. At one level, Nuttall`s paintings belong to an Italian world of sinuous hill towns and high personages in Renaissance helmets. The shadowy but sharply expressive forms which throng the spiral ramps of Nuttall`s towns, galleys and abstracts seem to come directly out of the great vaults of Piranesi. But at another level, this is a profoundly English show. The darkness behind the statements is northern. The main vision is that of a tradition of fantasy unbroken from Blake to Mervyn Peake.
Peter Nuttall is doing difficult things. He is figurative, but his solidities are those of dreams. He is a brilliant `illustrator`, but to a private text, or to one not yet written (hence his admiration for the `Fictions` of Borges). He is attempting to give to the human body the taut repose of rock and burnt earth. He is, I think, trying to express in rapid contour and studied volume something which Yeats summed up:
Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate
Know his work or choose his mate
George Steiner
| Back to last page |