Peter McArdle

"I always paint with oil on canvas, which I prime and sand several times with gesso for a smooth surface. I sketch out in pencil and use a 000 (cat’s whisker) sable brush to refine and define the sketch. Then I underpaint with burnt umber and glaze on top of that several weeks later – up to seventeen glazes. Paintings take six to nine months as an average. Usually a painting changes drastically in the last three or four months. At the final stage I reject around a third of the paintings."

Artist’s website

Hovering on the frontier between the familiar and the enigmatic, Peter McArdle’s painting address a range of contemporary issues. These works are an endless and imperceptible moving to and fro between dream and reality and any written description could be misleading because it cannot tell about McArdle’s sense of how little is enough – like actors sense of timing or the Japanese sensitivity to the value of emptiness and the isolated figure/object…

"I always paint with oil on canvas, which I prime and sand several times with gesso for a smooth surface. I sketch out in pencil and use a 000 (cat’s whisker) sable brush to refine and define the sketch…"

Paintings and biography