Reception: Friday, June 5, 5:30 - 7:30
Opening June 5th in LewAllen Galleries' downtown space on West Palace Avenue in Santa Fe is a meditative exhibition of recent work by consummate American painter Sammy Peters. Now in his fifth decade of producing sophisticated yet accessible mixed media work on canvas, Sammy Peters is an acknowledged master of a refined form of painting that is abstract but with allusions to imagery, both meditative and dramatic, sensually exciting and immensely soothing. This nuanced push-pull, back-and-forth between opposites, creates dynamic tensions that infuse his work with energy, beauty and even a sense of Zen-like wisdom.
A true painting sensei, Peters uses superior compositional skills and painterly technique in creating masterful combinations of color and form with subtle allusions to the disjunctures between objective and subjective reality. Now asserting, then equivocating, he seems to tease the viewer with images and design elements that are vaguely referential to the natural and built world. As a final stroke of genius or mischief, he gives the paintings maddeningly complex titles in a set form that hints at an underlying logic and possibly a key to interpretation. It is tempting to view each title and therefore each painting as a koan - that is, a paradox like those posed for novices by Zen Buddhist masters as a focus for meditation, to encourage them to abandon their ultimate dependence on reason and instead seek intuitive enlightenment.
Acknowledging the importance of structure in his work - that is, the arrangement of parts into wholeness, Peters prefers to describe his work as architectonic rather than abstract. His paintings feature rhythmic interplay of texture, color, image, gesture and space. Design elements such as ladders, tracks, stripes and grids; blocks of muted color; and patches of pattern, both painted and collaged, are repeated across canvases like variations on a fugue.
Peters is profoundly down-to-earth. Born in 1939 in Shreveport, Louisiana, he has spent much of his career in Arkansas and credits his rootedness in middle America for permitting in his work a strong sense of inherent authenticity.
Peters studied art history and design while a college student in Arkansas. He attended Little Rock University and also for one year, the University of Arkansas at Fayeteville.
Acceptance into the Arkansas Arts Center's annual regional competitive exhibition while he was still a student inspired him to continue painting even as he considered and trained for a career in theater. He studied drama at the Arts Center's School of Arts and Drama, then spent a year in California with the San Francisco Mime Troupe designing sets and directing.
Peters has pursued his painting career for nearly five decades and has gained renown through solo and group exhibitions in major centers as far-flung as New York, Atlanta, Boca Raton, Santa Fe, Houston and Los Angeles. He has earned many accolades including awards in competitive exhibitions, fellowships and solo exhibitions in major cities. His work is represented in a host of private and public collections from Little Rock to London.
