Peter Brooke: Ice Storms, Vernal Pools, and Other Natural Phenomena

May 5 – 27 at Gallery NAGA

Peter Brooke has exhibited his landscape-based paintings regularly for the past fifteen years in Boston, in New York, and in many other sites throughout New England and along the East Coast.  During this time the work has evolved considerably, from depictions of dark, forboding Delaware wetlands to vaulting atmospheres gathering above the Irish coast to inventions, in the vocabulary of the Vermont hill country, in which trees appear to be forming out of thin air or dissolving out of existence.

In his newest work, Brooke extends his interest in images of the natural world as a means for exploring the subtle and fleeting nature of human experience.  “This group of paintings,” Brooke says, “falling somewhere between reality, dream, and personal myth, explores the extraordinary in an ordinary natural environment.

“What I’ve essentially been doing,” Brooke continues, “is using landscape images to incorporate a personal sense of the experience of space.

“Within each painting there’s a suggestion of leaving, a coming or going, an exit.  The vernal pools are a good example.  They come, and they go.  They’re quickly lived.  And in these paintings the solid land forms become as dissolved as the water.”

In these paintings, nature’s changeability, the formation and dissolution of grandeur in even the smallest occurrence, provides Brooke an opportunity to make what he calls “an observation in which a series of events comes together to make the ordinary extraordinary.”

Peter Brooke: Ice Storms, Vernal Pools, and Other Natural Phenomena is on exhibition at Gallery NAGA from May 5 through 27.  A reception for the artist and the public will be held at the gallery on Friday, May 5 from 6 to 8pm.  In addition, Brooke will offer a free public talk about his work on Saturday, May 13 at 2pm.