Peter Jacob Christ
“Peter’s paintings convey his cheerful sense of humor and love of color through the representation of old street signage and everyday objects. Not only is his draftsmanship exquisite, but his sense of composition consistently creates for interesting and compelling pieces that reflect the wit and intellect of the artist. Peter is a prolific painter whose work, though representational, portrays an uncanny and curious abstract quality that insists that the viewer pause and reconsider what in fact it is that the painting represents.“
- Kathy Wright, Sculptor
ARTIST STATEMENT
Driving, Discovering, Drawing and Painting
I like to get in the car and just drive to unknown places via less traveled routes. I’m always on the lookout to discover subject matter and landscapes that grab me. What frequently draws my eye are faded but bold signs and street scenes that are unexpected. My wife and I are always on the lookout. Friends and family send bits they’ve spotted too. And when the time is right we’ll take a drive to see for ourselves.
I feel like people usually see signs without really seeing them. People take in the information on the signs without looking at them as a part of (perhaps even the dominant part of) our modern landscapes. I aim to translate what I see into what our modern landscape really includes… something that’s demanding and beautiful but not in the traditional sense.
Sometimes my paintings are focused on a single sign and it’s setting - the way light plays across the neon, the colors in the shadows it casts, the flaking paint, textures, the chains that suspend it from the crumbling brick work. Other times my paintings are a memory mashup of many different elements and settings that I’ve collected from these road trips.
What interests me at first is the immediate impression of what I see in its setting, but what keeps me interested are the visual variations that exist when all the different elements of the image (signs or otherwise) are combined. These elements that interest me are elegant lines, shapes with strong positive and negative spaces, and colors that are sometimes bold, sometimes subtle. Most fundamentally, my paintings are about lines and edges. There is an elegance to a line - no matter what art form - that excites me. Weathered surfaces, rusted metal, and broken typography are sources for suggesting texture variations but their edges drive my compositions. Broken is so often more interesting than pristine. And as a painting develops I no longer look to my photo reference material, the painting tells me what to do.
THOUGHTS ON PROCESS; In general my approach is to prep a piece with thumbnail sketches, based on memory, direct observational sketches, or my photographs, Then I create multiple compositional layers with variations in Photoshop. This leads to an under drawing on canvas in charcoal or thinned paint. Following this, things continue to evolve, where I’m often rearranging, deleting or adding new elements into the final puzzle as my painting progresses. I am a “schmearer”. I love to work wet into wet. I want my paintings to work at a distance, in the middle ground, and in close-up.
I don’t think of my paintings as photorealistic but “representationally abstract”. My images are always changed by me to express how I want the painting to look rather than how the photo actually looked. I’d like people to look at my paintings as a composition of abstract elements … and not just as a representation of recognizable objects. Everything is relational.
At times I also feel like an itinerant painter capturing images in the towns and cities I visit. My paintings can mean something that is “representational”, memorable and even nostalgic to the people that live in those places. However, to me they are completely independent of the locale.
Ironically, I often find the signs and scenes I’ve used as the basis for my paintings have been destroyed shortly after I've completed the paintings. Either by development or by accident. Perhaps I’m a curse.
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Peter Jacob Christ attended Syracuse University (BFA), studied painting at the Sir John Cass School of Art in London, and traveled through Europe before moving to New York. He earned a master’s degree from New York University (MA). Teachers that inspired him include the figurative painter Jerome Witkin and the pop artist Idelle Weber. Peter lives and works in New Hartford, CT.
Peter is represented by Alofft Gallery in Litchfield, CT