Acclaimed artist and mathematician Peter James Smith explores the terrain where contemporary depictions of the sublime intersect with science.  Drawn to the beauty around us, Smith’s main platform of painting sees breathtakingly sublime and romantic landscapes overlaid with related notes, jottings, and equations which reference his prior life as a professor of mathematics. 

Broadly situated around the idea of light, Smith's recent body of work covered a wide range of interlinking topics and approaches to themes of beauty, time, space, history and perception.  On the one hand referring to the idea of spiritual enlightenment, with its associated themes of seeing, awakening and desire for the beyond, Smith’s work also celebrates and finds a rapprochement with the historical Enlightenment, the era that advanced and affirmed clarity, logic and scientific enquiry. Light also makes reference to Smith’s recent tenure as Antarctic New Zealand Artist Fellow, where he travelled to the Scott Base for ten days.  The experience of the South Pole, with its extremes of terrain, its light and dark, its condensing of time and history and compression of time, embraces strong elements of the sublime while admitting the blacker counterpoints of accident, death and disaster. 

Peter James Smith was born in Paparoa, New Zealand in 1954. He is widely published as a mathematician and holds the degrees BSc (Hons), MSc, PhD and a Master of Fine Art in Painting. Until his retirement to fulltime painting at the end of 2010 he was Professor of Mathematics and Art and Head of the School of Creative Media 2002-9 at RMIT University. He was awarded a residency at Scott Base, Antarctica, in January 2010 as an Antarctic New Zealand Artist Fellow. His paintings are held in many public, private and corporate collections in New Zealand, Australia and internationally. He has held 54 solo exhibitions and been in 80 group exhibitions since 1975.