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Dawning, oil/linen, 60x72
Genesis, oil/linen, 72x72
Extinguished, oil/linen, 72x72
Tangle 1, oil/linen, 50x50
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Trees become metaphors for life in Peter Fiore's narrative landscape paintings.
For the past six years, Pennsylvania-based artist Peter Fiore has focused his work on the narrative landscape. Trees serve as the subject matter and major inspiration for his paintings. From the saplings to the scarred, Fiore explores symbols of passage: life and death, growth and change, rebirth and sustainability. It is in these scenes that Fiore also finds a human connection—a universal meaning.
Fiore began the series with his White Pine Suite, which developed while he recuperated for six months from a serious automobile accident. Fiore would visit a local field where he became interested in a white pine tree grove, and one tree in particular. In the spring, when Fiore returned to the site, he found a flash fire had come through the area, leaving the trees burned and blistered. The change had him looking at the tree differently.
"I was taken aback by how scarred the tree was," says Fiore. "I realized over time that the growth was coming in stronger than before. It became a metaphor for healing. That is how the series of trees began. It started with the White Pine Suite, and it's branched out since then."
Developing directly from the White Pine Suite are several of Fiore's newer works, including Genesis and Extinguished.
"Genesis is the painting of birth, where you have a small sapling growing in the shadows and coming into the light. Extinguished is the end of life," explains the artist. In Extinguished viewers will notice a tree in the shadows with lichen growing on its surface. The piece shows, according to Fiore, "Now that it's dying and gone, it sustains life… As life goes on, it's still supporting life."
In terms of style, viewers of Fiore's artwork will observe the work becomes larger and more suggestive. "If you look closer, it's more abstract, it's bolder and suggestive, and there's broken color and brushwork that, upon looking up close, show it's a tapestry that's woven. Because of value structure and temperature, when you step back, realism and sense of space is cured. It's really about the marks I make now," Fiore says. "That's related very much to my grandmothers. They were seamstresses, and they worked in the garment district by day, and at night, they'd make clothes or were kitting or weaving. Watching them with their hands making these things make this whole— that has inspired me in painting about layering and texturing and building one mark at a time."
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Fiore is represented by Travis Gallery in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and RS Hanna Gallery in Fredericksburg, Texas. Fiore received the American Art Collector "Award of Excellence" at the 2013/2014 ARC Salon Competition for his painting Tangle 1.
This article courtesy of American Art Collector
American Art Collector
April 2015
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