WATCH: Lewes exhibition featuring the work of Peter Chasseaud

Peter said: “I was born and brought up in Croydon and have lived and worked in Lewes for 50 years. My first visit to Lewes was in 1962 on a steam train from Victoria to Brighton via Uckfield and the bridge over Lewes High Street. I still have the photo I took on that occasion, leaning out of the train window as we came into Lewes Station. I am a painter and printmaker, who also works in several other media, and have been working in and around Lewes for 50 years. As I am now 75, I thought that an exhibition of representative elements of my work (all oil paintings on canvas) would be a good idea and would be not so much a retrospective as also a survey of work in progress, emphasising the continuity of my interests and themes and spurring me on to produce new work. My landscape and figurative work reflects the influence of the old, remembered, urban landscape of London and the rural vistas of the Sussex weald and downland – its swelling hill-forms and concave valleys, its trees, skies and heavenly bodies – and also of human figures, dancers in particular. I have based some of my dance paintings on drawings I did at dance companies’ rehearsal and practice sessions. My interest in landscape encompasses related fields such as topography, cartography, flight and aerial photography.

“I am a painter and printmaker, who also works in several other media. I started oil painting at school, encouraged by an enthusiastic young art master who had taken over the old school gym as a studio for his students. At one stage one of my paintings was hanging in the headmaster’s study. I did my foundation course in 1969-70 at Croydon College of Art and was involved with the Croydon Arts Lab when David Bowie – who had just released Space Oddity – came along with his acoustic guitar to sing this and other songs. I then studied Fine Art Painting and Printmaking (lithography and etching) in the mid-1970s at Brighton Polytechnic.”