Peter Graham | Gather in the Golden Grain OLSEN GALLERY 30 July - 23 August, 2025
The title of the exhibition is Gather in the Golden Grain. It is also the title of an old spiritualist song; I have a long term hobby of collecting pre-war rural folk musics. I think of golden grain like granules of the sun, or the particles that comprise us, being illuminated. I have long envisaged a “human animal” in its earliest mythic mindset and generic form, encountering its environment in a first state of awakening, transforming its surroundings through wonderful capabilities of mind. Fundamentally this concept has inspired much of what I do, both in terms of subject and as an imagined ideal approach to working!
Gather in the Golden Grain is a group of large figurative paintings in which I imagined the “shadow-form” of my own body projected into a newly awakened state of consciousness, as if it were witness to the first light of a waking dream. I imagine this source of light similar to that which illuminates behind closed eyes- an unearthly glow that penetrates the surface of physical things and exposes the sub structures of the environment surrounding us. In this state of primal awareness, I depict my own shadow as a kind of “nature spirit” with enlivened senses, transmitting song throughout a state of wilderness so that it’s environment becomes enchanted. It emits radiant exhalations like a spore and is beholden by the birth of its own song like a dawn chorus.
When I depict a figure that relates to the actual scale of the body, it somehow seems as if that depiction has been extracted from the body itself – like a luminous shadow projected upon the surface. In depicting the form of a body within a painted space, it is as if the paint becomes a literal skin, a cladding for the body of a spirit that resides in another realm, like an interdimensional being. I make different types of pictures to deal with different frames of mind.The group of works in the exhibition developed gradually, through the unfettered immersion into painting without a set framework or agenda. Paintings of this ‘slower’ type are often more romantic or naturalistic in their appearance, evoking visual states of mind as they might appear in nature. Often the tending to the slow gestation of oil painting is like gardening, and my work is to nurture growth as it develops seemingly of its own accord.
The figures in the paintings appear frieze like, as if they were cross-section diagrams of psychic beings for a biology illustration. They harvest nutrients in an Arcadian shadow-orchard on the other side of consciousness. They are images of a body awoken within a dream, of a king-harvest in the fertile ground of my own shadow, under a midnight sun.
To seek the fruit borne from your own dark root, 2025 oil on canvas
