Peter Messer

You could call Peter Messer a ‘local’ artist, but there is nothing amateurish about what he does. He works from a studio in Paddock Road, and barely ventures out of the triangle of space between there, his beloved and beautifully kept allotment further down the same road, and his house in Market Lane, with the odd trip to the Con Club or the Lewes Arms thrown in. Most all of his paintings are set in this little parcel of territory, amid the shadows, undulations and flint walls of the castle’s banks. “Local artist?” he says. “I guess I am. But I guess Canaletto was, too.”

There is nothing twee about Messer’s townscapes, intricately painted with tempera on gesso. In fact there’s usually something dark lurking on or just beneath the surface. In one painting in the third, and last, of his annual exhibitions at the Star Gallery a ghostly Victorian girl skips down Castle Rise. In another an angel with garish-coloured wings sits on a bench at the top of the same hill with an empty plastic sandwich packet in his lap. In all his paintings there is an interplay with light and shadow; an acute awareness of the shifting of time. There is humour there, but the comedy in his broken narratives is black as jet. “Peter is what they used to call a genius,” says Julian Bell, a friend, and another ‘local’ artist of some repute. “We’re lucky to be in a position (well, some of us) to snap his paintings up.” AL