“The language of color and all of the associated meaning and history is an integral part of Peter Andrew’s work. Peter has mastery
of the symbolic and physiological aspects of color.”
From Color and Peter Andrew’s Artwork by Michael Skalka, Conservator, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
“Your work is very impressive. Great unity. More power to you.” - Myron Barnstone, Artist, owner Barnstone Studios
Landscape is a tough place to make your mark as a painter.
Mainly because any painter working with landscape inevitably sets himself
up to be compared to the big name art-guys like Corot, Turner, Monet,
Homer, and the Wyeths. One way to face the challenge is to reinvent the concept of landscape. Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the husband and wife artist team installing art within a real, live countryside (Wrapped Reichstag, 1971-95; The Pont Neuf, Wrapped, 1975-85); have changed the way we
see landscape, placing the viewer squarely in the midst of inescapable questions about where art, terrain, engineering, and even politics begin and end.
Another way over the hurdle is to pretend that the hurdle isn’t there,
trusting that every life and every set of eyes is different, and that a fresh
view of the land and sky will emerge if you just work the process of painting. The problem with this approach is that we’ve all been so conditioned to looking at landscape through the Corot-Turner-Monet-Homer-Wyeth filter
that it takes real work – and real faith – to find an original view of the land.
But, once in a while, the process does work, and a painter like
Peter Andrew proves it.
Peter Andrew’s best paintings have an extraordinary sense of immediacy and place, a quality that he achieves through recognizing the principle of
‘less is more.’ His works are elemental, seducing us first with his arresting sense of color. Every artist acts as a prism, splitting light through a unique
filter, and colors come through Peter’s prismatic sense in clear, clean strokes. Nothing is muddy in Peter’s paintings.
His subjects are as clearly distilled as his color, with crisp horizon lines that seem to carry incontrovertibly beyond the
painted surface. And the scale! How else to pull the viewer into the space of a landscape than to fully fill the field of vision?
Peter understands that all of this elemental simplicity allows the viewer that most valuable experience in art: a sense that
we’re participating in the work. Without knowing how or why, we insert ourselves into the painting, filling in the spaces from
our own experience.
A few years ago, I moved my family to the Northeast, a land of hills and water and trees. Lots of trees. For the first
40 years of my life, I’d lived in Colorado, a landscape that is noted, most obviously, for the drama of high elevation. After
moving to the farm country of western New Jersey, I was surprised to feel claustrophobic. It took some time for me to figure
out why. It wasn’t the people or the proximity of larger cities or the traffic. It was the trees. All those oaks and sycamores
and birches crowding out the sky.
I came to understand that landscapes, like people, become part of us in ways that we don’t often fully understand until we
leave. And I discovered that, after leaving the west, it wasn’t the mountain-scape that I missed the most. It was the sky, the
daily wonder that comes with living on the high plains with few trees to block the view, beneath an open and endlessly
changing vault. Peter Andrew’s paintings allow me to step back under – and into – that sky, filling in the painted image with
my own sense of longing and wonder. As the world becomes increasing crowded by the layers and noise of technology,
Peter’s best work carries me beyond the intellectual pleasures of good painting and gives me something far more basic and
precious: Peter Andrew’s paintings offer space to breathe.
By David Pyle, VP/Division Publisher, Interweave Press, and author of “What Every Artist Needs To Know About
Paints & Colors”,
“Andrew uses simple designs and innovative color resonances. He believes in the efficacy of pure form and that the distillation
of pictorial elements can produce profound beauty. His works are like musical compositions, visual symphonies of color play.
The goal is pictorial harmony and intellectual and visual satisfaction, elements innate to human experience of earth
and landscape.”
By Susan Baker, PhD Art Historian, University of Houston
“Texan Peter Andrew showed an array of fabulous landscapes using an uncommon technique, which involves a fusion of
pastels and oils. The artist was thrilled with his experience, selling most of his inventory, and extolling many compliments to
the crowd attending.”
By Karen Brantley, The Times Picayune, writing about Andrew’s art opening in Covington, LA
