Peter Combe is a Canadian-British contemporary artist and photographer known for his three-dimensional artworks made of collaged paint chips. Based in San Francisco since 2008, Combe has focused his practice on exploring the multi-disciplinary aspects of working with paper as a medium. Through this, he envelops the aesthetics of other mediums, including painting, sculpture, photography, and digital media.
Peter Combe creates three-dimensional images using household paint swatches as a primary material, which he regularly hand-punches into small colored disks. He places these commercially produced paint samples into bevel-cut grooves on a specially prepared archival surface so that the colors he selects appear at 45-degree angles, revealing both the front and reverse side of each color swatch. The artist engages the sculptural possibilities of these disks, building the illusion of images that seem to move and change depending on the viewer's perspective. From a distance, Combe's subjects gaze at the viewer, while upon closer inspection, the stunning details—resembling colorful, perfectly circular fish scales—reveal themselves, forming an integral part of Combe's unique visual language.