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ELIZABETH PEAK
Table with Pots, 2003
color etching, edition 25, 9 5/8 x 9 5/8"
NEW WATERCOLORS MONOPRINTS AND PRINTS
JANE HASLEM GALLERY
December 2003 - January 2004
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All of us have been
there. Been to that one place which for us remains fixed in time, unspoiled
and eternal, to which we can always return, and feel as we once did, be as
we once were, while all about us the world sheds its seasons, writes its
histories, and rotates unpredictably into the future. Place and the usually
elegiac passing of time, these are common themes in art, so common, in fact,
that one is likely to be disappointed with most compositions in which these
themes figure: the barns and covered bridges, the mountain ranges and
woodland snowfalls-images more likely to be sold by the size than by the
quality of their expression.
Still, there are those artists who can take old themes and make them new
again. Make them speak in news ways. Elizabeth Peak is one of them. In her
current exhibition, Elizabeth Peak demonstrates yet again her profound
awareness of place and time, and how the two can be juxtaposed,
superimposed, balanced, and counterbalanced to illuminate what is unique,
meaningful, even miraculous in a given place and time.
In "Under the Key Bridge" (1997), "Potomac River Thruway" (1997-98), "Key
Bridge" (1998), and "Ripples at Roosevelt Bridge" (2003), Peak chooses
familiar places and transforms them into extraordinary spatial and temporal
metaphors. In all of these images, Peak creates perpendiculars and axes to
structure her compositions into constituent, often contrastive panels
depicting, for example, the interaction between past and present, human and
nonhuman, heaven and earth, light and dark, line and curve, and solid and
fluid. Most often one sees two impulses in Peak's work. There is the tight,
technically obsessed etching and the more loosely controlled watercolor and
pastel.
This pressure and release is characteristic of much of Peak's work and
creates a dynamic tension and complex texture as is evident in images such
as "Table With Pots" (2003), where one can literally see the wood's hardness
and the porcelain's fragility; in "Fall Ginkgo Leaves" (2003), which
captures the brittle thinness of golden autumn leaves; in "Approaching the
Rockies" (1991), where, above the weight of the mountains, cumulus clouds
billow into colossal formations; and in "Early Morning-Potomac River I"
(2002), where the water's eddying captures exactly the crosscurrents of
obstructed water flow.
In images such as these, lines and color collide and break, not
shatteringly, but rather concomitantly, creating beauty out of discord and
discord out of beauty. Perhaps more than any other quality, it is this
quality in Peak's work that is so utterly remarkable. For her world is a
world in which everything matters and mingles and miraculously takes hold.
Elizabeth Peak teaches printmaking at William and Mary College in
Williamsburg, VA, where she also curates exhibitions for their museum.
John A. Haslem, Jr. Ph.D
artlinePlus Critic |
