The work of Peter Waldron (b.1941) is influenced both by the abstract expressionism of the post-war period, and by the Victorian Arts and Crafts movement, and the way in which this drew inspiration from Japanese culture.

Waldron paints from a light, airy studio in Hastings. For nearly 30 years he also had a studio in Crete having been introduced to the Greek island by Patrick Caulfield, for whom he worked as an assistant from 1967 to 1969. While he likes to see his work as a continuation of British modernism, his paintings are also informed by years of buying and selling antiques, when he became fascinated by the study of sacred rocks and the way in which these are laid out in Japanese gardens.

He says: “In a lot of my paintings the shapes and the scale have that sensibility of a Japanese garden. The spaces in between and the composition are extremely important. The most recent paintings very much have that background to them. I like something that people will return to. I like them to have many meanings, rather than an immediate impact.”

The pieces in his latest exhibition, ‘Overture’, fall into two distinct groups. The first comprises five large canvases with fluid forms in pastel shades, black, brown and white, which relate directly back to the art scene of the mid-twentieth century. Waldron originally trained as a mechanical engineer before studying at Swindon School of Art and later at the Chelsea School of Art, where his tutors included John Hoyland and Richard Hamilton.

He went on to rent a studio at SPACE in St Katharine Docks, East London, alongside Bridget Riley and Peter Sedgley, and had solo shows at the Serpentine and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. His work was also shown at the Royal Academy’s Big Painting exhibition and at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester.

The second is a group of smaller ‘studies’ on card in black, white and ochre which he produced in his studio in Hastings during lockdown. He explains: “I wanted something that was spontaneous. They aren’t studies to produce larger works, they are more an exploration of my own spirit.”