Art with a whimsical flourish

The work of Peter Heard

Peter Heard was a self-taught artist but a background as a chartered civil engineer and bridge designer provided him with the precision of a draughtsman. The brightness and off kilter graphic humour of his naïve art compositions first catch the eye, but look closer and you will see fine details and intricacies depicting quintessential English villages or portraits of people engaged in sports and other pastimes.

If there is a sense of fun in his pictures, his close to 50 years of painting and exhibiting showed him to be a seriously successful artist, staging five highly popular solo shows at London’s Portal Gallery – one of the world’s premier galleries of the naïve genre.

The giant lighthouses of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, were a great inspiration. Always fascinated by light and structure, he began a stunning collection of graphic lighthouse paintings and called it “a magnificent obsession”. After moving to East Anglia from the West Country it was perhaps inevitable he should paint Suffolk’s finest coastal beacons at Orford Ness and Southwold.

In much of his work flat perspective and simple graphic forms act as reference points to which Peter, who died in 2021, added his own contemporary twist.

His work was celebrated worldwide and the