Peter Kettle – Fictional Realism

Peter Kettle is a full-time painter. Private collectors include Clive James, Sir Nicholas Hytner, Alan Bennett, John Banville, Lord and Lady Young, Tom Stoppard, and Maggie Smith.

Clive James said, at the artist’s one man show in Covent Garden, ‘Pete is the world’s first Fictional Realist… He doesn’t copy these wonderful paintings; he invents them, based on his memories of a place or on his meditations about a subject. He never uses photographs and admits getting bored if he copies what everyone else can see. What he does do is read. Whether it’s poetry, fiction or fact he finds ideas bounce off the pages. That’s what makes him fictional; anything he might be reading can nudge him into an image. I asked if he sets things up in his studio and he said never. He likes taking his mind and his brush for a walk, keeping the beginning loose and full of mystery. Then he leaves it sometimes for weeks or months. He describes this way of working as right for his own brand of imagery, of serendipity.’

Back to basics, after Art School he spent a frustrating time doing knock of Pollocks and Rothko’s. And then he returned to what he is best at, Realism with a fictional accent. Sometimes a word can do it, or just a title. He marries the collision of a thought and a subject, and often makes a metaphor into a painting. His work has often been in the Royal Academy, Royal Society of British Artists, The Intelligent Eye, the Albemarle Gallery, and many others in London. He won a Silver Medal at the Paris Salon, and another Silver Award in Tokyo. He won an award for his work on paper, and he was voted into the top ten paintings at the RA one year.