Peter Griffin was born in 1947 into a coal mining community in the north of England. Leaving school at 15 his teenage years were spent working in a series of factory jobs, playing rugby league as well as hitchhiking around Europe .

Throughout these years he attended night school where he gained the necessary qualifications to allow him to attend art college. After gaining a degree in fine art Peter won a place on the masters course at the Royal College of Art in London. From there he was awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome scholarship. This allowed him to live and work in Rome for two years.

At the Royal College Peter came into contact with several major artists, including Francis Bacon, Howard Hodgkin, and David Hockney who were teaching there at the time.

During his studies at the Royal College Peter was fortunate enough to be asked to work in the studio of the great Surrealist painter Roberta Matta. Through working with Matta, Griffin began to understand how the inner world of the imagination could be made visual through the suggestion of the painted mark or gesture. This element of suggestion and recognition; the balance between abstraction and description gained clarity for him during his time in Rome. He became interested in the many fragments of Roman sculpture that could be found everywhere. Depending on the degree of erosion that had occurred, any individual piece could range in appearance between an almost complete abstract form through to a highly recognisable figurative fragment. Occasionally it was possible to find pieces that contained both abstract and figurative elements within the same form. It was this discovery that was to play a crucial role in the development of Griffin's painting.

The influence of these sculptures allowed Griffin the freedom to use both abstract and figurative elements within his own paintings. These forms and figures have the capacity to both conceal and reveal emotional and physical expressions, while also ensuring a continuing human presence in his work, irrespective of whether or not there is a human figure.

Like most artists Griffin has been asked many times about the ideas and content of his paintings. He always replies they are about "what it means to be alive" its hopes, its fears, its joys and its sadnesses. This is reflected in the title of some of his exhibitions  "Love, Life, Love", "Life is Now" and "Identities". In using the term "what it means to be alive" Griffin is simply saying that reflected in his work are observations on human emotions and behaviour. In some ways it could be described as how human beings, both as individuals and as members of a larger society deal with life and its many transformations which he believes to some extent to be timeless and universal.

Many solo exhibitions of Peter Griffin's paintings have taken place in several countries throughout the world, his work has also been included in numerous national and international mixed exhibitions (see www.petergriffinart.com for details).

As well as the many exhibitions of his work Griffin has also been involved in other art related projects. In the years between 1988 and 1992 helped the Greek Cypriot poet and painter Stassinos Paraskos establish the Cyprus college of art. Griffin was also invited to attend the Triangle international artist workshop in New York where he worked alongside artists from over thirty countries throughout the world. Two years later he was invited to Australia as artist in residence at the University of New South Wales the paintings that he created there were exhibited at the Beattie Gallery in Sydney and other works he created there were later exhibited in London.

Around this time Peter became aware of similarities between the ideas expressed in the poems of the late Nobel poet laureate Pablo Neruda and the ideas he was dealing with in his own paintings. Using some of Neruda,s poems as a starting point for his own paintings Griffin started putting together a body of work based on his own reflections on these poems. This came to the attention of the Neruda Foundation who approached him with the idea of creating an exhibition to mark the 25th anniversary of the death of this great poet. After spending two years creating 30 paintings as well as a limited edition boxed set of prints, the work was finally ready for exhibiting and opened at the European Academy in London, before traveling to Buenos Aires, Concepcion, and opening on the night of the 25th anniversary at the Neruda Foundacion in Santiago Chile. This exhibition and the subsequent tour opened up new areas of opportunity for Griffin's work.

Griffin designed a stage set for a concert at The Royal Festival Hall in London which featured amongst others the actress Emma Thompson and the singer Peter Gabriel. He later worked in collaboration with the American playwright Ariel Dorfman (Author of the award winning stage play and film "Death And The Maiden") on a project entitled "Identities" which linked the written and spoken word and the visual image in an installation at the Riverside Studios in London which later travelled to Trinity College Cambridge University, and the European parliament in Strasbourg.
 
In 2002 Griffin was commissioned by the Ortega y Gasset foundation in Madrid to make a body of work to celebrate the centenary of the Spanish philosopher. Griffin sought to see how these writings related to his own life and experiences and once that relationship was established it became the starting point for the new body of work. In working with these three very different writers Griffin has refused to be involved in simply illustrating their words, instead he has always insisted in finding the relationship between his ideas and those of the writers and it is out of this fusion of ideas that the paintings are created.

Throughout his life as a painter the central issues in his work as always revolved around that initial concept of "what it means to be alive". As an artist Griffin as always maintained that the very criteria for making art is quite simply one of having something to say and finding a way to say it, or as Picasso once stated "to search is nothing, to find is the thing".

If you would like to know more about our work go to the Helen Bamber Foundation

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