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The Cyprus Paintings 2005-2006 by Jonathan Peter Smith

A paradise of lush vegetation and greenery which envelopes you all around where you are living, overlooking a lush valley with the sparkling rich blue sea in the distance, peace and quiet, the hot sun, a gorgeous breeze, going out walking daily in a small ar and was ea around Lemba and seeing image after image of enticing colours and  shapes of the landscape which inspires painting after painting like the one above 'Triangular Structure of Colour (Outdoor Painting, Lemba, Cyprus)'- this was my experience living in Cyprus from 2005-2006. My post graduate course at the Cyprus College of Art where the late great Stass Paraskos taught will always be a memorable and special time in my life and enriched my painting. The thirty-five small paintings that resulted over six months (of which I have sold fifteen across Europe and Britain) were all created outdoors and each taking two-four hours directly from the landscape, which was such an invigorating experience. However, I wanted to abstract from what I was seeing and experiencing. They were all based on places over quite a small area around Lemba including the tiny beach, but nonetheless this small area inspired countless exciting images for me. These paintings evoke the heat, light, forms, colours and natural lushness of the Cypriot landscapes around Lemba. These paintings are categorized by their bright colours, rawness, freshness and vitality.

I would typically have a fresh Cypriot kebab (which are like nothing else you would get in Britain, these were cheap yet the meat was fresh and great quality and so generous with the helpings too!) overlooking the valley, then go for a walk in the remote landscapes nearby and would just see a gorgeous inspiring image full of wondrous colours and shapes which would fire me up, and then I would go back to the studios within minutes pick up my portable easel and paint box and go to that spot and paint from that scene. I would finish the piece after several hours, and then fulfilled I would have a hearty dinner and a fresh huge delicious baklava which were so fresh and cheap from the local supermarket and eat outside amidst the lush greenery and vegetation flowing and enveloping me in the warm evening sun - glorious days! Painting details: 'Triangular Structure of Colour (Outdoor Painting, Lemba, Cyprus)'-by Jonathan Peter Smith, 2005 148 x 21 cm,

Oil on primed wood with hanging batons at the back,

£99.00 inc. thin natural coloured wooden frame (shipping/delivery costs will be added)

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Discussing 'Ambush (Memorial to the Ancient Welsh Who Defended Their Land)' by Jonathan Peter Smith

Invading armies into North Wales reported how the ancient Welsh would suddenly appear, as if from nowhere with a cacophony of noise, ferocious violence and arrows (being some of the best archers in the world) and then disappear into the woods in a stealth like way, leaving the invaders totally disorientated. The painting above

'Ambush (Memorial to the Ancient Welsh Who Defended Their Land)' evokes this ambush tactic that the ancient Welsh perfected.

This small abstract artwork came out of my weekend experience in North Wales, around Blaenau Ffestiniog and Cwmorthin and is one of many Wales based paintings I have done. It conveys a deep sense of place (history, multiple viewpoints, textures, climate, features of that place) and my experience within that place. An artist I was really getting into at the time was Peter Lanyon.

Cwmorthin is a strange place: it is a spacious valley landscape with a lake and is tranquil with delicate colours that blend and harmonize into each other (I was there in Autumn in an Indian Summer); and then it is pockmarked with bleak slate hills and ruins of the brutal 19th C industrial mining past and some of the ruins are almost blackened and crumbling down, yet these ruins are also beautiful in a strange poetic way.

Interest in History From Childhood:

This kind of historical landscape where history marks the present, is the kind of one I used to visit as a child with my father, for example in the Isle of Sheppey with world war ruins of pillboxes on a landscape perched on cliffs, and I dug up historical artifacts thinking I was Indiana Jones!! This immersion into archaeology and history started as a child. I like reading about history and political history, and I wanted to understand the place of North Wales better before I painted it.

I have combined many viewpoints around Blaenau and Cwmorthin and multiple experiences of a particular day into this painting:

-the pattern on the homemade cake I ate that day (which was delicious) is worked into the vertical form.

-the vertical form also references the many ruined buildings around Cwmorthin.

-the harsh crumbly textures of the ruins feature on that form also.

-an old mining track into the hill in another area nearby is also in that vertical form.

-the climate, airiness, space and colours of the pastoral side of that area is evoked.

-my happy mood that day and on that trip is in the joyful happy colouring.

-the book I purchased that day on 'The Battles of Wales' by Dilys Gater, is referenced in the ambush evocation in this painting:

Historical Narrative evoked in an abstract form:

I began this page by telling you about the ancient ambushes, I have created a kind of narrative in the painting from left to right, in the most abstract way: The two red arrows are the invader with blood on their hands. They travel through the lush landscapes blissfully unawares that they are being monitored and led into a trap...

Then suddenly, the disorientating vertical form traps them. This painting ( if you click on the painting you will be able to see more clearly) is actually a kind of triptych with three parts put together. This vertical form  recedes back from the rest of the painting's surface, like an archaeological excavated hole below ground (further evoking a sense of history and the past within a place). This is meaningful to the narrative in how the invaders fall into this trap as it were. The ferocity of arrows attacking them from wooded trees is evoked. This whole form serves as a disorientating effect to evoke this warfare tactic the Welsh perfected successfully. The sudden violence came and then went leaving the invaders completely bewildered and disorientated. Then the red arrow disappears off the painting, defeated. The ancient Welsh tribes won many battles but lost many also.

But also, this painting functions on another level: this is abstract and has its own life and personality and is to be enjoyed for its own sake, by the visual feast of colour, texture, shapes, design and rhythms.

Painting's details:

'Ambush (Memorial to the Ancient Welsh Who Defended Their Land)',

signed on verso

2016

30 x 40cm

acrylic and collage on card

£ 300. 00 (delivery and shipping costs will be added to this)

contact e-mail: smithpeterjonathan@yahoo.co.uk