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Spanierman Gallery, LLC is pleased to announce Peter Poskas: A Sense of Place, an exhibition and sale, featuring works by this eminent contemporary landscape painter. For three decades, Peter Poskas has been devoted to painting the rural dairy farms and landscapes of Litchfield County, Connecticut, and for the last decade, to portraying the fishing cottages and jagged coastlines of Monhegan Island, Maine. With his crisply detailed imagery, sensitivity to subtle gradations of light, and compositions that are taut and complex, Poskas’s works are authentic transcriptions and poetic evocations. In the tradition of Andrew Wyeth, Poskas unites seemingly dispassionate views with a personally nuanced, emotionally resonant expression. Accompanying the show is a catalogue with a biographical essay, twelve full-page color illustrations, and an artist’s chronology ($20 ppd).
Poskas was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, a small industrial city on the banks of the Naugatuck River. After deciding to study art instead of forestry and wildlife management, he trained in his home state, first at the Paier Art School in New Haven and later at the Hartford Art School, from which he graduated in 1964. He continued his studies in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. During the era of Abstract Expressionism, realism was out of favor, but throughout Poskas remained dedicated to his craft as “a process of isolating elements of painting and working on them in a single-minded kind of way.”
In 1975, after a period in which he focused on painting the streets and buildings of Waterbury in a manner that evoked the urban imagery of Edward Hopper, Poskas moved to Washington, situated in western Connecticut’s Litchfield County. Transfixed by the area’s small farms, worked by rugged individuals who respected the land and whose rambling farmhouses and outbuildings were settled into a terrain of undulating hills and open countrysides, he began to paint his surroundings in what is known as the Weekeepeemee Valley. This was a landscape in which time seemed to have stood still. Yet, as the artist was aware, the ways of life that he observed were transient—many of his farmer neighbors lived alone and lacked heirs to carry on their work—and Poskas felt an urgency to document a type of landscape that would soon disappear.
Within this seemingly narrow focus, Poskas has created an indelible record of the last vestiges of our country’s agrarian history, capturing them before they recede into our memories. Indeed, often seen bathed in the lingering yet ebbing light of late afternoon, Poskas’s landscapes evoke a sense of melancholy for a time when people lived in the close and intimate connection with nature that we associate with the American rural tradition.
Like Wyeth, whose work he greatly admires, Poskas is driven to paint particular places, and he returns to the same locales again and again, capturing their nuances and distinct personalities. Yet, departing from Wyeth, Poskas rarely includes figures in his images. He focuses on the implicit evidence of human presence in the landscape rather than on the occupants themselves. He notes: “I like the idea that these people belong to the land,” They have left their mark on the land, shaped the landscape as it too has shaped their lives.”
True to this statement, in his Connecticut works, Poskas has focused on particular aspects of the homes and properties of his neighbors, recording the evidence of the human imprint on the land while creating complex images in which he carefully calibrates the warm/cool balance in luminous surfaces. Poskas’s interest in the preservation of independently owned New England farms led him to take action, in 1995, when he bought the old Johnson farm, preventing its sale to a developer. Poskas has featured this subject in many recent works, including Emerging Spring, Johnson Farm, in which the farmhouse is seen cropped from the road’s edge, and in River Bend, Johnson’s Farm, where he took an intimate perspective on a snow-covered landscape, capturing the reflections of the sky in the neutral snow-covered ground. In other recent Connecticut works such as Tanner Farm, Indian Summer, Poskas has created broad panoramas set within elongated horizontal canvases, revealing his awareness of how the eye moves across the surface of the work, the texture and substance of the soil and stubble, the movement and weight of the land, and the interplay between the shapes of his motifs and the shapes of his canvases.
After thirty years of focusing on the fields and farms of Connecticut, in the early 1990s, Poskas began to spend time on Monhegan Island, a tiny island seventeen miles off the mid-coast of Maine, which has long been a favorite locale for artists, drawing such prominent figures as Robert Henri, George Bellows, Rockwell Kent, Edward Redfield, and Edward Hopper in the early twentieth century. Although its rocky terrain is the antithesis of the rolling hills of Connecticut, for Poskas, there is a close connection. For the artist, the island offers “a coastal kindred spirit to rural Connecticut, and there is a link between the farmers of the soil and the farmers of the sea—both are immersed in their place and tools of their craft, the details of their everyday lives.”
Even before discovering Monhegan, Poskas found it hard to paint summer landscapes in Connecticut where “the canopy of green overwhelms and absorbs the qualities of light, which are normally my concern in the three other seasons.” On Monhegan Island, “the sparse foliage surrounded by the reflective sea, literally opened the door to summer painting for me.” Like his artistic predecessors on the island, Poskas is drawn to Monhegan’s unique light: “What intrigues me about Monhegan island,” he says “is the light in all its facets: at times subtle and caressing and at others harsh and penetrating.”
Poskas has captured all of the variability of Monhegan’s light in his art. In Six Fathoms, featuring a sidelong view of the home of Jamie Wyeth (which was once the residence of Rockwell Kent), the canvas shimmers, the vibratory play of light flickering across the sea and radiating in the steeply pitched roof of the home at the ocean’s edge. In July Fourth, Poskas portrayed a building that was once the dwelling of the Monhegan lighthouse keeper and is now a museum. An American flag with thirty-four stars is seen hanging prominently over the side of the building. The historic flag is fitting to this quintessential emblem of the American fishing village of an earlier era. In this case, the cold, clear light seems to lock the scene in time, as if to preserve it as an icon for posterity.
Occasionally Poskas paints more expansive images of Monhegan. In Red House, Morning Fog (Monhegan Harbor), his view is toward Swim Beach, the island’s recreational beach. From an aerial perspective, we are drawn along the curve of the low rock-lined shore. By contrast with the red Henry Tresethern Homestead (built by early settlers and still used as a residence), the sea has a mystical presence, appearing as an endless mirror that stretches into the misty distance.
On Monhegan, Poskas continues to be driven by his passion to revisit subjects he has come to know well. Making daily rounds of Fish Beach, noting the markings of the sun on Lighthouse Hill, the unfolding flowers of friends’ gardens, doorways left ajar, windows airing, or shadows changing shape, he captures the feeling of a particular place with which his affinity has grown through familiarity. Throughout Poskas’s work is evidence of the artist’s careful attention to how shape, color, light, and atmosphere relieve and modify each other. Infusing his art with his longstanding devotion to a subject matter that has personal resonance, he constructs an oeuvre in which the formal and the experiential are fully intertwined.
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