Peter Joyce is an English painter and teacher born in Poole, Dorset. He attended Bournemouth & Poole College of Art & Design from 1980 to 1982. The artist then studied at Stourbridge College of Technology & Art from 1982 to 1985 where he obtained a BA (Hons) in Fine Art. Peter Joyce went on to teach at the Bournemouth Arts Institute for many years. Joyce became Chairman of the 'Room 10 Painting Group' and served as President of Bournemouth Arts Club. Peter Joyce was also involved in filmmaking and this included several notable artists such as Gillian Ayres and Elisabeth Frink. Joyce himself was the subject of a 45-minute film by Grove Films called "Peter Joyce '86" which documented the artist's work.
Peter Joyce has exhibited regularly and widely throughout the UK as well as internationally. Joyce's work is held in many corporate and public collections including Lloyds, National Westminster Bank, Reuters, Binder Hamlyn, Bank of China, Hill Samuel, Cleveland County Fine Art Collection, Russell Cotes Museum & Art Gallery, Poole Museum Service, Hampshire County Council and many more. His paintings are also held in international private collections throughout Europe, the UK, USA, Canada, India and Saudi Arabia.
Peter Joyce paints beautiful landscape images and is notable for his coastal paintings which tend towards abstraction with black, grey and white very much in evidence. Joyce's paintings are reminiscent of the St Ives artists. He is a landscape painter but these are landscapes of the imagination, rooted in nature and are subtle translations of the everyday in muted colours. Peter Joyce paints using acrylic paint on canvases of varying sizes. Alongside traditional brushes, he also uses palette knives, rollers, squeegees and sandpaper to build and erode the layered surfaces into richly worked terrains. The artist explores the imaginative boundaries of landscape through this process. This is a highly tactile and process driven form of abstract painting.
Although Joyce retains a home in his native Dorset, he has spent recent years mainly living and working in the remote Vendée region of western France. He works from a converted oyster shed studio where his wife Joe also hand-crafts the frames for his pictures. Joyce continues to draw on the formal explorations rooted in his earlier responses to the Dorset coast.
Peter Joyce says that his work 'could be described (if it really had to be) as abstracted from landscape'.