Devotions
Nov 8 – Dec 21
Vermont-based artist Peter Brooke presents his latest group of magical landscape paintings in the exhibition, Devotions.
Peter Brooke: Devotions will run from November 8 through December 21 at Gallery NAGA, located at 67 Newbury Street, Boston MA. A reception for the artist and public will be held on November 15 from 5 to 7pm. The artist will lead a walk-through of the exhibition on November 23 at 1 pm.
Brooke’s oil paintings are fabrications based solely on memories of his travels and surroundings. Neither specific as to place nor time, all the paintings share a metaphysical quality. Intuitively reacting to the landscape, he paints using an additive and subtractive process: dark paint is laid over a lighter ground and scraped away to reveal the layers beneath. The landscapes confront and recede from the viewer revealing a variation of distance and perspective.
Brooke, as always, manages to draw viewers into a world of imaginary scenery capturing not only the physical beauty but also the evanescence of each feeling. The absence of any figures or human life allows viewers to become solitary characters in each new environment, allowing them to meditate on the tension between nature and the intangible emotion of impermanence it inspires.
I started this group of paintings from a place of reverence: reverence for the memory of a landscape experienced, a landscape lost and finally a landscape recreated. Memory is the vehicle by which my work is best created. This past year, my daily practice in the studio transformed into a kind of daily devotion: a spiritual devotion with an earthly core. My devotions are not to a god or entity but rather they form around a landscape found within. Here, the “within” refers to the memory of a landscape known, a landscape lost, a landscape imagined or even one yet to be. The resulting paintings are idealized, compressed, recreated and reimagined landscapes of the mind. They are unabashedly sensual and are intended to be experienced slowly. Liminal in nature, each painting presents a threshold in which one may pass through. Some contain a shelf upon which the landscape rests, while others offer paths and tracks that lead to a metaphorical threshold. Many have spectral prisms. Here the landform is presented as an object through which light is dispersed. Through refraction, the phenomenon of dispersion becomes another threshold one may pass through.
We live in a time of great ecological transformation. This body of work is intended to act as an elegy to what we stand to lose. There is beauty in sadness.
Brooke’s work is in the permanent collections of Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven CT, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, MA.
Images of the work can be found at gallerynaga.com.