APRIL 04 - APRIL 27, 2002
Recent Landscapes
East Grove
LOF-152-OC
In Peter Loftus's latest large-scale panoramas of coastal Northern California, the power-struggle between extreme natural beauty and the modernist distance required of a contemporary landscape painter is clearly revealed. An exhibition of Loftus's latest works runs April 4–27, 2002 at Hackett-Freedman Gallery.
Unlike many contemporary painters who select quieter settings as a medium for expressing their emotions, Loftus has chosen the powerful beauty, vivid color, and supernaturally dazzling light of the California coast near Carmel and Santa Cruz against which to express himself as a 21st century painter. In this struggle of forces, Loftus emerges the clear winner. His views of the rocks and trees near Point Lobos reveal the wild energy of the coastal landscape with swirling, kaleidoscopic patterns of paint and color which are nonetheless applied with sophistication and restraint. Despite the magnetism of his subject, Loftus does not resort to traditional romantic devices to extol its beauty.
Former San Jose Mercury News art critic, Dorothy Burkhardt, describes Loftus as "a subtle and elusive artist, a painterly realist indebted to Impressionism, attuned to abstraction, [and] convincingly in command of his medium." And these works convince us likewise.
While the brilliant shock of hot color Loftus uses in Bluffs and Ice Plant hardly seems elusive, Loftus contains the powerful energies he unleashes in the painting through his exquisite control of brushstroke and tonality. In East Grove, Loftus counters the stunning beauty of the ocean through a veil of ancient, gnarled cypress trees on the cliffs above.
Loftus also moves inland to depict major panoramas of the coastal mountains, as in Cloud Shadow & Russian Ridge, where he reveals the play of sunlight and cloud on hills turned almost impossibly bright green during a California winter.
Loftus studied painting at the Maryland Institute and received his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. He moved to Santa Cruz in the late 1970s, serving as a visiting lecturer in studio art at the University of California, Santa Cruz from 1975 through 1991. In 2002 Loftus exhibited in Visions: Northern California, a show of contemporary landscape painters at the Bank of America Plaza in San Francisco; he participated in Re-Presenting Representation at the Arnot Art Museum in upstate New York in 2001. The previous year, Loftus was featured in a two-person museum exhibition with artist Willard Dixon at the Hearst Art Gallery of Saint Mary's College of California. This is Loftus's fifth solo exhibition at Hackett-Freedman Gallery.