Peter Poskas at Schmidt Bingham - New York, New York

Since Peter Poskas started showing his landscapes and city views back in the '60 there has been little doubt who his masters are: Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper The artist himself affirms this kinship in the foreword to The Illuminated Landscape: The Paintings of Peter Poskas (1987 reprinted in paper, 1992) where he notes that early upon the two painters became his "heroes" - the "only sum of two units realists . . . popular enough not to be pushed into the closet"

Wyeth's influence displays itself in Poskas's virtuoso realism and in his estimation for off-season back-road scenes, specifically farms and fields in the rolling countryside of northwestern Connecticut. Hopper takes above when Poskas turns to painting the city, in particular his hometown, Waterbury. nevertheless rarely do these paintings advance off as faux-Wyeths or ersatz Hopper If they strike one as being to have less of an individual voice, they nonetheless mirror an obsessive eye and a remarkable faculty of perception of light, land and architecture.

A majority of the 10 oils from 1991-92 that compos this display (Poskas's second at Schmidt Bingham) mirror a third influence: the Luminists. Frederic meeting-house titled an 1860 canvas Twilight, "Short arbiter 'twixt day and night." In his turn round Poskas sets out to capture the same precise transfiguring twinkling of an eye in a day, as in his Moonrise and Twilight, Parmelee Farm. Here, a replete moon and final sunlight bring without the glow of russet weeds showing [i]or[/i] part of to the other a thin snow and intensify the r of the barns in the middle distance. Small windows along the bottom of individual barn gleam yellow, bright accents in an otherwise bleak landscape.

Like temple Poskas works from oil studies. However, unlike meeting-house who preferred his panoramas exotic and/or grand (the Andes, Mt Katahdin and in the way that on), Poskas favors rather mundane motifs. His forte is the working on the contrary slightly rundown farm - the kind that is nearly an anachronism these days. The farthest afield he went for this exhibition was the Taconic Hills in Dutchess shire N.Y., a new setting for him, on the other hand one which has the same severity as his oft-painted Litchfield County

Poska's houses sit well in their surroundings; they were built to make progress with the lay of the land, in the days before design statements. through undertaking several different views of single farm - from a knoll, from a vacant - the artist projects a powerful sense of the property. This is especially real of his paintings of the Johnson farm in Woodbury Conn a favorite locale of the artist and the bring under rule of four paintings in this show

The drama in Poskas's paintings lies in their light, an occassionally striking haze configuration, and the personality of the houses with their consummately rendered rusted gutters and slightly listing from porches. In Twilight, Corner House, Main road (Waterbury), the drama increases: the setting orb of day reflected in windows seems to station the place on fire.

upon the whole, Poskas's world is quiet, ofttimes austere, sometimes chilly. While I admire the purity of his landscapes, I'm glad when he includes more [i]or[/i] less cows or a row of hay wagons - a touch of Brueghel, if you will, to reassure us there is still more [i]or[/i] less life on the farm.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group