A Dutch artist who came to North Dorset in the 1990s celebrates a quarter of a century of creativity in Dorset and Cornwall
© Peter Ursem
At the end of the 1990s, Dutch artist Peter Ursem came to North Dorset with his musician wife Helen Porter. She had been appointed as music animateur for Confluence*, a three-year cultural and environmental project to celebrate the Stour, from where it rises at Stourhead in Wiltshire, down to the sea at Christchurch Harbour.
While Helen began a long and exciting programme, bringing people together to sing, write songs and music and perform, Peter also became involved in Confluence, his skills as a printmaker contributing striking and original art works throughout the project. His contributions ranged from simple but stylish prints of fish for England’s first Water Market, a national gathering for producers involved with water, at Blandford in 2000, to a series of prints supported by an Arts Council award.
Some of his work from the Confluence period, such as the lino-cut of Colber Bridge, will be on show in his 25th anniversary exhibition at Shaftesbury Arts Centre, from 30th October to 12th November. The exhibition will also include a broad selection of new works: prints, designs and paintings.
Woodcuts of the Stour
After graduating in literature from the University of Utrecht and in painting and printmaking from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, Peter arrived in Dorset in 1998 and fell in love with the lines and shapes of the English landscape. He started exploring ways to capture what he saw in relief printmaking (woodcuts, lino prints and wood engravings) and was soon completely hooked.
He recalls the thrill of his early efforts: ‘I was gripped by this simple but strikingly powerful technique. I was so excited when I produced my first print of a street view in Mere.’
His print-making was given a big boost in 2000, with an Arts Council award for a series called Reflections, Woodcuts of the River Stour – the 30 wood-cuts were exhibited at the Slade Centre in Gillingham and published in a book.
He became a member of the highly respected Poole Printmakers. When the presses that belonged to the group’s founder, printmaker and artist John Liddell, were being sold, with help from two committee members and an agreement to spread payments over two years, Peter was able to buy one, a Victorian Hopkinson & Cope press (above).
The purchase enabled him to start specialising in reduction lino-prints, a technique where consecutive colour layers are printed from just one block.
As his skill, range of subject matter and use of colour all developed, Peter’s work acquired a strong local following. One of his most high-profile commissions (in a literal sense) was to provide a new mast-head for the front cover of the original Blackmore Vale Magazine. Familiar features of the Blackmore Vale, from Stourhead to dairy cattle, were depicted in the much-loved design. Peter’s commission also included similarly characteristic designs for the Fosse Way Magazine (covering a lot of Somerset) and the Stour and Avon Magazine.
He also showed great skill as a curator, working for Salisbury Hospital at Odstock, where he ran the successful Arts In Hospital project, filling the corridors with exciting and often challenging work – abstract, figurative, landscape, portrait – creating a gallery that was not only interesting for visitors but a stimulating environment for staff and patients.
Overwhelmed by the beauty
In 2011, some years after the end of Confluence, Peter and Helen moved to Cornwall, settling near Calstock, at Gresham House Studios, a former mine captain’s house. Peter’s spacious art studio has spectacular views towards Morwelham Quay, with Dartmoor in the background and ever-changing skies above.
Peter says: ‘Initially, I felt so overwhelmed by the beauty, purity and magic of the landscape that not much more than soaking it all up seemed possible.’ But as he became more used to the unique atmosphere of their new home, he found that immersion in his surroundings led to a flurry of new and more intricate lino-prints, as well as atmospheric charcoal drawing and oil paintings.
Peter’s subject matter is usually landscape, exploring deeper than simple realism. A series focusing on Dartmoor captures both the surface aesthetic attraction of the landscape and the often disturbing, almost primeval, majesty of the moor. The moor is, he says, a continuous source of inspiration.
A fiction ambition
The history of Gresham House played a part in Peter’s own writing career. In 2016, he fulfilled his long-held ambition to write fiction, when he published The Fortune of the Seventh Stone, a young adult novel written under his Dutch name, Petrus Ursem. The setting is a mine captain’s house, with nearby atmospheric ruins of tin mines and a cast of colourful characters. The book is a genuine page-turner, with a real sense of place. It was followed by The Truth Teller (2018) and Black As Ink (2020), together making up the Steven Honest Trilogy.
In 2022, Peter branched out into a different style of story-telling, publishing The Bigger Picture, a collection of witty and thoughtful fables for adult readers. He is currently working on a new book of fables, Stellar Celebrations.
Over the years, Peter has established a tradition of reading stories during his exhibitions, and he will be doing this at the Shaftesbury exhibition: every morning at 11am, he will read one of his fables and be available to chat about his work and his approaches to art and writing. Stellar Celebrations is not quite finished, but he will be reading from The Bigger Picture. If you’re not able to come to the exhibition you can order his books online from the gallery shop on his website.
• 25 Years of Printmaking exhibition at Shaftesbury Art Centre, 10am to 4pm daily. Free admission.
• For more information about Peter Ursem’s work as artist and writer or to order a book, visit peterursem.co.uk
**CONFLUENCE – was created by the ground-breaking Shaftesbury-based environmental arts charity, Common Ground, to encourage new music for the Stour. There followed an extraordinary range of participatory music events and programmes, workshops, courses and concerts. Composer and musician Karen Wimhurst, who lives in Shaftesbury, was the composer in residence.
