About Peter Chetwyn Appleton, Artist, Leicester UK

arbeit macht frei

About Peter Chetwynd-Appleton

I do not know what drives me to create my art work, but it is persistent and to ignore or repress it makes me quite uneasy and restless. By the age of eleven I had already formed the notion that I should go to an Art School, and work as an artist. Why or how I had reached this conclusion is still not clear to me. It has always been an itch that needed scratching: sometimes it will lie dormant, sometimes driving me on in frenzied activity. Kandinsky referred to the work of art as an outward expression of an inner need.

Producing Art, for me, has for a long time had to do with exploring the possibilities of the unknown, but often referring to the past.

The German Romantic poet, Novalis, said that "Within ourselves is the eternity of all worlds past and future." There was no contradiction between the inner and the outer world, the subjective and the objective. In Pollen, his book of aphorisms, he goes on to say, What is outside me is right inside me." Relying on instinct, experience, antagonism, arrogance, self doubt, blind faith, self assurance, etc, I set out on this voyage of discovery each time I begin a piece of work. However, I find the process taxing and it leaves me feeling thoroughly drained, as though some form of energy had run to earth. It certainly does not offer the relaxing or therapeutic exercise most people would think. It is more like Mole's panicky journey through the Wild Wood in Wind in the Willows".