Peter Brook

Artistic background

I was first given a go with oil paints in the 60s and I’ve used them ever since. Interviewed for Art School in the ‘70s, I was assured that as an art graduate I’d probably never touch a brush & oil paint again, so I gave it a miss! However, oil painting has always remained “what I do”.
I think it was Ruskin who said that mountains were the beginning and the end of landscape. They certainly got me going! The coasts of Britain and Ireland, music and the theatre also get me going, as does the magic and nostalgia of steam railways. In recent years, I’ve made paintings of subjects as diverse as red squirrels, puffins, angels, a shipwreck, the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and seascapes in Ireland and the Scottish Isles.
When we moved to Cockermouth in West Cumbria around the turn of the century, as a painter I was like a child in a sweetshop, and set about making oil paintings, many of them plein-air sketches, in the lovely Cumbrian landscape. I’ve been able to combine working for a small homelessness charity (based in Whitehaven) with making as many outdoor oil sketches as time and the Cumbrian weather allow! I like to cycle out to paint en plein air whenever possible, ideally producing in about 3 hours, a good, lively-looking painting which can be hung, still wet, as soon as I get it home – an “oil sketch”. The mentors I probably keep in mind the most in this endeavour are Constable, Daubigny and Corot. In short, I’m trying to “do a Corot in Cumbria”, and hopefully sometimes come close. I’ll certainly keep trying!