January 14 - March 26, 2017
TO ATTRACT BEES: PETER ACHESON - RECENT WORK
Artist Reception Saturday January 14th from 4-6pm
PETER ACHESON - RECENT WORK

 

Peter Acheson has written about his recent work: 

I think of each painting, sculpture, or object as a specific location within the work just as specific meadows, clearings, trees, and cliffs exist within the general forest. Each specific location is inhabited by specific beings; lichens, mushrooms, oaks, and owls. Certain places in my life have provided me with a vocabulary of forms,  hardwired color sensations , and a sensitivity to the spiritual beings that inhabit those landscapes. Place, rather than space. Location, rather than “abstraction”. 

We feel the landscape around us, whether rural or urban, to be animated. One can find the ‘wild’  anywhere if one looks for it. I certainly prefer the intersecting, overlapping, codependence of wild systems over the categorized, isolated, meaning-seeking structures of thought. The shaped leaves that allow us to differentiate oaks from maples are ‘wild language’. The slender snow edges and icicles that articulate tree branches in winter are its poetry. The most accomplished botanist cannot but approximate the life of an apple tree, its chemistry, its endurance, its joy in spring. ‘Animated’ and ‘animal’ come from the Latin Anima, which in turn became Jung’s word for the feminine creative spirit in Nature, interchangeable with ‘Psyche’, and ‘Soul’. From the Greek word for the Life Force, Zoë, we get ‘zoological’. Our language still bears traces of the Wild, and is wild itself. Simply put, I seek to equate Painting with Nature; each piece as specific, but no more important than birchbark or crow feathers.

Thompson Giroux Gallery
57 Main Street
Chatham, NY 12037