Lewes.<\/a>\n<\/p>\n\n ![]()
The Voice (Image: Peter Messer)\n<\/p>\n
\n Peter, who studied fine art at the University of Brighton and exhibits at the Star Brewery Gallery in Lewes, has largely restricted his subject matter to the parameters of the town all his working life. As the art critic Julian Bell observes: \u2018Has ever a stretch of any town, anywhere, been more attentively portrayed?\u2019 It\u2019s tempting to compare Peter with the painter Stanley Spencer, who similarly appropriated Cookham in Berkshire, even raising the dead in the local graveyard for his famous resurrection scene.\n<\/p>\n
\n Peter used to be uncomfortable with the term \u2018local artist\u2019, feeling, to paraphrase the TV dramatist Dennis Potter, that putting \u2018local\u2019 in front of \u2018artist\u2019 was like putting \u2018processed\u2019 in front of \u2018cheese\u2019.\n<\/p>\n
\n ![]()
October Evening Castle Lane (Image: Peter Messer)\n<\/p>\n
\n \u2018I have now come to realise that local doesn\u2019t necessarily mean limited,\u2019 he says, when we eventually find a place to sit in his cramped studio brimming with artist\u2019s materials (unusually he works mainly in egg tempera on gesso). \u2018It can be more rewarding to see one place with many pairs of eyes than to see many places with one. I\u2019m not sure whether Lewes has a particular magic or whether, like many artists, I\u2019m simply dealing with what is to hand.\n<\/p>\n
\n \u2018I get rather tired of having the \u201cmagic of Lewes\u201d rammed down my throat, often by those at least partly responsible for diminishing it. I used to think the foundry was magical and the railway yards, the wet fish shops and the seed merchants, the printers and the cement works. Many will recall the heady excitement of buying a useful everyday item in Lewes High Street. Be that as it may, any self-respecting artist should be able to discover magic or be capable of inventing it. Or both simultaneously. It is our job.\u2019\n<\/p>\n
\n Though he grew up in Burgess Hill, Peter\u2019s connection with the town stretches back to boyhood. \u2018I came to school here because quite a lot of grammar school kids from my area were sent to Lewes. Then, in the Eighties, I moved here.\u2019\n<\/p>\n
\n ![]()
Flight (Image: Peter Messer)\n<\/p>\n
\n He resents the town\u2019s gentrification. \u2018A lot of people come here because it ticks the right boxes. They see it as a beautiful backdrop to their lovely lives. \u201cI\u2019ll do well here,\u201d they say, but they don\u2019t mix. You hear them referring to locals as \u201cin-breds\u201d with a condescending tone that grates. They only get to know people who come from the same bit of London as they do. They hunt in packs.\n<\/p>\n
\n \u2018Lewes seems to have turned into a cross between Hampstead and the Groucho Club, but I remember a time when the people here had never heard of extra virgin olive oil. Loads of us still recall tractors in the town; when the traffic was held up by old vans with baler twine. When I was at school, there was a cattle market in Lewes. On market day the place would be full of drunk farmers in the afternoon.\u2019\n<\/p>\n
\n Peter, in contrast, a life member of Commercial Square Bonfire Society, is indelibly woven into the town\u2019s fabric, and vice versa.\n<\/p>\n
\n \u2018I have always been fairly sensitive to layers of narrative and experience, and because I have been in or around Lewes, on and off, since my schooldays, many of my personal layers have accumulated here,\u2019 he says. \u2018There are buildings and corners that I have looked on as a schoolboy, a young man and a middle-aged one, in a range of physical, mental and material states. People important to me have left, died or been redistributed around the town.\u2019\n<\/p>\n
\n For this reason, the past is almost as alive to Peter as the present. Echoing TS Eliot\u2019s immortal lines from his poem, Burnt Norton, he is a great believer that \u2018all time is eternally present\u2019. Or as Einstein famously observed, \u2018Time… is what keeps everything from happening at once.\u2019 In the great space-time continuum, there is little to separate \u2018time present and time past\u2019. Just a pane of glass. A gust of wind. That\u2019s why the dead inhabit his pictures.\n<\/p>\n
\n \u2018Maybe past lives do impress themselves on the fabric around them,\u2019 he says thoughtfully. \u2018Who\u2019s to say that the physical world isn\u2019t one big recording device? I often think of the century-old glass-plate negatives of Edward Reeves Photography, our venerable High Street institution, capturing endless past aspects of a town as solid and present as the one I walk through now, thronged with people exactly as complex and alive. They, and we, echo from the flints and bricks.\u2019\n<\/p>\n
\n Peter talks of moving about Lewes in a state of almost hallucinatory immersion. \u2018It is possible, like William Blake, to stare at a knot of wood until one becomes frightened of it,\u2019 he says. \u2018There are shadows, strange patches of luminosity, weird flints in the walls and gesticulating trees which, equally, can revert to familiarity when the light or wind changes.\u2019\n<\/p>\n
\n Perhaps that\u2019s why he is attracted to the gloom, like another artist he admires, Atkinson Grimshaw, that great Victorian painter of moonlight. Who knows what comes out to play under the cover of darkness? Do the dead mingle with the living?\n<\/p>\n
\n Solitary human figures, lost in thought, often inhabit Peter\u2019s pictures, usually in lonesome and desolate places. Are they being watched? I\u2019d say so. Sometimes they are substituted by a lone fox. A black cat. A wolf. The night is their time.\n<\/p>\n
\n Messer prides himself on his spider sense; what he calls \u2018being attuned to atmosphere\u2019. He isn\u2019t a religious man and doesn\u2019t believe in the supernatural, but he doesn\u2019t rule anything out either. \u2018I\u2019ve never seen God but then I\u2019ve never seen an atom. The only thing I do believe in is the unknowable.\u2019\n<\/p>\n
\n Just as Doctor Who had his Tardis and Captain Kirk his teleportation machine, there is an area of Lewes that has a similar transporting effect on Peter, allowing him to enter different worlds. He estimates he has walked the stretch of ground between Castle Banks and Castle Lane, from his home to his studio, more than 7,000 times, in all lights, weathers and seasons, but it has never lost its hold over him.\n<\/p>\n
\n \u2018I have painted aspects of this short walk in the middle of the county town for years, never quite knowing why I return to the same narrow beat. What is so compelling about it?\n<\/p>\n
\n \u2018There is a Celtic tradition of so-called \u201cthin places\u201d where the borders between worlds become more fluid. I choose to think this area may fit that category. Perhaps some places behave like animals: if you ignore them and are immersed in your natural self, they will approach you. They may not trust you as such but they will sometimes drop their guard and, if you are lucky, things will be revealed.\n<\/p>\n
\n \u2018Sometimes, when I walk up there, I feel a brush with something. It\u2019s difficult to put into words without sounding silly, but I\u2019ve felt a jolt which has made me think, \u201csomething just happened then\u201d. It\u2019s as if the texture of the light changes in a weird way. That\u2019s what inspired my painting of the little Edwardian girl running. I sensed her presence.\u2019\n<\/p>\n
\n It\u2019s not a gift shared by all. \u2018The roots go deep in Lewes,\u2019 he says, referencing its ancient history, \u2018which is why it annoys me when I see people swanning around, viewing the town as some kind of lifestyle purchase.\n<\/p>\n
\n \u2018I like the idea of Lewes not being what they think it is. I have a sense of them confidently sashaying around town, and little mocking spirits, who know where the truth really lies, following them around.\u2019\n<\/p>\n
\n He captures this brilliantly in his painting Two Shadows, depicting a man taking a nocturnal walk through Lewes, mobile phone clamped to his ear, oblivious to his surroundings. A street lamp casts his shadow against the flint wall beside him. Behind, at three paces, is another shadow, of a little mocking figure doing a Wilson and Keppel sand dance. It is surely Peter reincarnated as the imp of mischief.\n<\/p>\n
\n To find out more about Peter Messer\u2019s work or to purchase original work and prints, visit starbrewerygallery.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Walking into Peter Messer\u2019s tiny studio in Lewes, I am confronted by a large painting on an easel.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":364645,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-364644","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364644\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/364645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}