Peter Baldwin

My work innovates within a modernist tradition. The ideas, narratives and cryptic symbols are engaged in a correspondence with a personal language of formal relational aesthetics. The inherent pleasures of aesthetics are for me significant, as is the way one art form can aspire to the conditions of pleasure in another. The work I create is usually dependent on a particular maritime locale. The derivation can often involve a living experience taken from seminal moments. The pictorial construction emerges slowly with a great deal of reflection. There is inevitably the tendency towards aspiring to a poetic condition; the work of Paul Nash, David Inshaw and Michael Andrews are of particular interest in this respect.

Tree of Life is my contribution to Salthouse 2010. The theme is 'Landmark'. The tree provides the symbolic context for the story in Genesis and the cross is in some way a pictogram of the tree. This interpretation, by contrast, is celebratory of the here and now which involves joy, discovery and friendship. The influence of Paul Klee is also apparent. He employed the tree as a simile for the creative process. The artist standing at his appointed place, the trunk of the tree, he does nothing other than pass on what comes to him from the depths. He neither serves nor rules - he transmits.

In Orfordness Warrior I have reconstructed elements from the Orfordness landscape to create an image that has a sense of surreal presence. On the left is a figure form developed from an iron pipe, which at some time was used as a means of containing an explosive device. The family group are a critical part of the structure, imposing a human presence, giving stability and unity to the composition. In this way I try to create significant content out of formal necessities.