Peter Archer — Notes from an Inland Sea
Peter Archer used to paint landscapes on the Cornish side of the Tamar river. Their most notable features were lovingly observed trees and the tall chimneys of abandoned tin mines. One might have expected that when he moved to a coalmining valley in South Wales, his landscapes would have become blacker and its main features hills and slag-heaps. Instead, he has gone to sea, not literally nor even as an observer from some visited shore, but in his imagination. The Welsh coal-mines may have had something to do with it, since these are predominantly grey paintings in which, like Conrad’s Thames Estuary, ‘the air was dark above Gravesend, and farther
