Peter Chapin

Making art is a process of thinking through. Working with acrylics on wood panels or canvases brings out certain thoughts, while scratching metal plates with a drypoint needle leads to other forms and ideas. People most of the time think in words. When painting or printmaking I think in the medium of visual form and with the tools and materials I have in hand. I rely on them to lead me into researches I wouldn’t otherwise have explored. Painting is not a way to externalize an idea already formed within the brain. It is a way to find new forms and ideas in the physical, working process.

I hope that viewers will find meaning in my work by using their minds and imaginations to recreate the work of art in terms of their own life experience and thereby share in my attempt to grasp or at least reach some small truce with what goes on in life.

At the end of each painting process I seek verbal titles, and often rely on puns. The art itself inevitably brings about double meanings. Every mark plays its part both on the surface and in the pictorial space, just as musical notes are often both chord elements and parts of melodic lines. The thing about a painting is that it is a thing, yet shifting identities and dynamic interplay of forms, imagery, and pictorial space make it possible for paintings to become metaphors for the activity of living.

Working with acrylic paint, monotype, drypoint, gouache, and oil pastel, I am aware of much that has been done with these materials. It is at one and the same time a very personal struggle within my own specific situation, and a conversation with a rich diversity of visual art traditions.

My wife and I moved from New Jersey to New Mexico in 1987. The influence of that move goes beyond the marvelous landscape. Involvement with new people and new cultural traditions in new contexts has somehow both challenged and clarified my thinking about what I am part of and who I am.