2col sap

Peter Poskas, “Sap Rising (Woodbury, Connecticut),” 2006, oil on panel, 24 by 28¾ inches.

2col september

Peter Poskas, “September, Stonington (Maine),” 2007, oil on panel, 14½ by 16½ inches.

Typesetting copy, photos scanned 11-20

MUST RUN 11/30

PETER POSKAS’s ‘NEW ENGLAND’ AT SPANIERMAN GALLERY w/2 cuts

avv/gs set 11/20 #720257

NEW YORK CITY — Spanierman Gallery, LLC, announces the opening on December 6 of “Peter Poskas: Recent Works — New England Reclaimed,” an exhibition and sale of paintings depicting New England farmscapes and views of Monegan Island, Maine, to which Poskas has been dedicated for more than a decade.

In his works, Poskas focuses on the rural New England that, while retaining its roots in the past, still exists today. Showing old farmhouses, barns, boats and fishing shacks preserved within natural settings, Poskas suggests that efforts to restore and maintain the past provide an antidote to the environmental threat that is constantly becoming more dire and to the ebbing away of the countryside as a result of continued settlement and industrial development.

Avoiding a romanticized viewpoint, Poskas adheres to the appearance of his subjects, while subtly rearranging what he observes, exploring the moods evoked by varying qualities of light and relationships of forms.

In depicting the rural countryside of New England, Poskas has chosen a subject heavily laden with symbolic resonance: since the early Nineteenth Century, artists and writers have extolled this part of the country as distinctly expressive of American ideals, even while they bemoaned its loss.

Despite how long its death knell has been sounded, much of old New England still exists as drives through the region today reveal — paradoxically, it is perhaps the anticipated disappearance of old New England that evokes the past; Poskas’s subjects are the small family farms of transplanted urbanites and of nonfarmers, who choose to keep old dwellings as intact as possible.

Instead to depicting boarded-up farms or rotting outbuildings, which would evoke longing (as in the works of Andrew Wyeth), Poskas focuses on inhabited places, where lifes goes on.

In “Tiger Lilies at Wik Wak,” his subject is a former fishing shack on the shore of Monegan Island that is now a vacation cottage rented yearly by the artist and his family. The appreciation of this irregular structure on the water’s edge is reflected in Poskas’s attention to the sunlight refracting from the irregular, shingled roof of the house and to the wildflowers left to grow freely.

In “Late Afternoon,” he features a Victorian mansard-roofed house in Stonington, Maine. Here the vantage point and the eerie drama of the sharply contrasting light and dark bring to mind the similar images of New England’s Victorian homes by Edward Hopper.

In many of his works, Poskas paints scenes that seem classic New England vistas from a bygone era, but nuances of habitation are present, such as snowmobile or car tracks in the snow, newly painted barns, or the patched up spindled posts supporting the porch of an Eighteenth Century home.

In images of Monhegan, the presence of human involvement in the landscape is evident in the light reflected in windows and in the presence of beach chairs that have clearly been occupied recently. That Poskas’s paintings are not of a vanished time is apparent in works such as “Last Light, Monhegan Village,” in which a panoramic view of Victorian-style hotels along the coast in Monhegan seem just as inviting to the eye as they did to those of a previous generation.

Poskas’s works associate artist’s constructive methods with the way that effort needs to be made to preserve old buildings and the rural landscape, so as to breathe new life into them and give them continued relevance today.

Born in Waterbury, Conn., Poskas studied at the Paier Art School in New Haven, Conn., and at the Hartford Art School, from which he graduated in 1964. Poskas lives in Washington, Conn., where he settled in 1975.

The gallery is at 45 East 58th Street. For information, www.spanierman.com or 212-832-0208.