Stephanie Peek - Certian Riches

Stephanie Peek, Annette Corcoran, Adrienne Defendi
November 11 - December 22, 2011

Opening Reception - Saturday, November 12
1:00 - 3:00 p.m

Stephanie Peek
Without Time, 2011
Oil on panel
30 x 30 inches
$4,200

November's show explores the theme of Ars longa, vita brevis...or Art is long, life is short.  We are very pleased to have the work of three talented artists coming together for this very special show.  We do hope that you can join us for the opening reception, this Saturday afternoon!

About the work of Stephanie Peek:


"Fecund comes to mind. Profusion. Mystery. Loss.
Stephanie Peek’s recent still lifes are splendid and they are rarely still. Redolent of 17th century Dutch painting and brushed with a lavish and delicate hand, Peek’s work is also distinctly contemporary in its ambiguous surround. In variant choreographies, her flowers express attitudes of movement suspended in space. Atmosphere is aqueous. Gravity absent. Downward is up, forward back. Spaces are glimpses, less defined than suggested and they are radiant and unsettling...flowers turn, dip, glide and bow. Time expands. What emerge also recedes. Space feels voluptuous and forever. Seeing is the first part. Watching is the rest.

Naturalistic in their depiction, but not in their spatial surround, Peek’s floral sites are as assured as they are varied. Paint is washed, brushed, scraped, smeared and revisited. Often dark and always quiet, these flowered couplings and configurations form sorrowful evocations. Peek’s subject is less subject matter and more the nature of nature; a seductive and compelling exploration into the dark undertow of transience."
—Judith Foosaner, 2011

Stephanie Peek
Good Luck, 2009
Oil on panel
30  x 30 inches
$4,200

Stephanie’s inspirations for this body of work:


"For years the subject central to my art practice has been nature: from dark gardens as a kind of refuge, to camouflage patterns as a response to perpetual war, and always complex color fragments as a way of seeing. The genesis of this current body of work, Certain Riches, was an image of a rich red flower from a still-life by 17th century Dutch painter Rachel Ruysch. I painted a loose rendering of that flower into the dark smoky atmosphere of an earlier night garden painting from my Dark Arcadia series, made at the American Academy in Rome in the late nineties. The deep red burned out of the darkness. I tried another color, then another until I was satisfied with the cascading of many colors through the deep space. In addition to floral borrowings from the dark Northern European tradition, there are also softer, lighter paintings which reflect the melancholy of early 18th century French painter Jean-Antoine Watteau.  And in Requiem, the American Romantic painter Martin Johnson Heade is quoted with his iconic magnolias. Using flowers, leaves, insects from several sources, I also work from direct observation and photography. Suspended in silence, these flowers speak for me of fragile beauty and the ephemeral nature of worldly delights. Flowers traditionally represent the intransience of life, a kind of memento mori, yet the very fact that they ever existed can afford solace and be seen as an intimation of beauty as an immortal quality. Like paradise, the very absence of what once was causes us to long for it, a longing that may include melancholy, nostalgia even, but not only—also the hope that there is an unchanging principle behind beauty, a kind of soul, the idea of paradise as possible."—Stephanie Peek, 2011

Stephanie Peek
Transition, 2011
Oil on panel
30 x 30 inches
$4,200

For more information on this show or to schedule an appointment with an art advisor, please contact the gallery at (415) 441-4777.