Peter Messer

Born in 1954, Peter Messer studied Fine Art at the University of Brighton. He works mainly in egg tempera on a traditional gesso ground and has exhibited in solo and group shows in the UK, US, Germany and France.

His work has frequently been exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and the New English Art Club and he has been a finalist in the Hunting, Garrick Milne, Lyn Painter-Stainers and Singer and Friedlander Prize exhibitions. In 1998 he won the Sotheby’s -sponsored Chichester Art Prize and in 2000 was commissioned to provide twelve paintings for the Sussex Book of Revelations, an Arts Council Millennium Project which toured Sussex libraries. In 2004 he completed a commission for the House of Lords.

‘On The Way To Work. The Lewes Paintings Of Peter Messer’ was published in 2007. 

‘A Thin Place in Lewes’ was published in 2021.

He lives and works in Lewes, Sussex and has paintings in collections in Belgium, France, Germany, Holland, Spain, Norway, Sweden and the US, as well as the UK.

“My paintings are mostly on a domestic scale, resolutely figurative and, by implication, narrative. I paint in the historic medium of egg tempera which I prepare in the studio using egg yolk and raw pigment.

I hope that these are intent and watchful paintings which, for all their quiet ‘realism’, demonstrate that the unseen exists and has properties.  It seems that I work in a world sensed by many but frequently ignored or overlooked. I hope I can help to remind them”.