[ car traffic humming ]
-I call this my
second painting career.
[ tailgate shuts ]
I painted hard in my 30s
and 40s and showed hard and worked hard
and I had two young ones, two kids
and something just had to give.
So the painting gave very happily
And I kept on painting in the 20 years since then.
I kept on producing paintings, but not at a rate
you could show or get a gallery involved.
I got invited to be in this gallery
and about a year and a half ago we agreed to a show
and so I knew of nothing else.
Here was a chance to to put out a single solo person show,
and I had a room to work on it in where I could,
you know, see it all at once rather than piecemeal.
So try to really pull it all together.
♪♪
I would call my painting style
broadly representational or impressionistic.
I think about Impressionism not as the 19th century
phenomenon of Impressionism a la Monet,
but I think of Impressionism as a mode of seeing
where you're trying to pick up the way
the eye blurs, the way light lands on things.
And that's a very old visual motivation that goes back
as far back as you really want to look at paint.
You know, Velásquez is maybe the first agreed
progenitor of an impressionistic view.
So that's where I'd like to keep going,
is a loosely rendered
depiction of the world.
♪♪
You ask about materials
and you know, I've been around oil paint now
40 years and people get very esoteric about oil paint.
It's got a lot of whispers and mysteries about secrets
of the old masters and things like that.
And the longer I'm around it, the more
I just enjoy treating it as a, you know, a worker's tool.
And I'm very specific about what colors I use.
There are about 15
that I pull from, but they're from different metal groups
that I know the way they're going to respond,
you know, one set is in cadmium,
one set is based in iron, and one set is based in aluminum.
And I know how they're going to behave.
I like thinking about the
behavior of all of that colored metallic powder
suspended in a gallery of translucent oil
and the way those different particles actually interact.
♪♪
My work has changed
in the last couple of decades because I've learned
how to get myself out of the way of the scene.
I've pushed enough paint around now
that I can set it down;
get it to behave and then leave it alone,
as opposed to keep fussing with it.
That took many, many, many paintings
to even know what that's supposed to look like.
This show for me is showing me more about the way
light behaves and the way paint can depict that.
But it can't happen
without really opening myself up to what I'm seeing.
♪♪ [ running river water ]
♪♪
The whole
peninsula has informed my eye and made it
willing to paint raw things,
including raw settlements:
the housing we do, the roads we build, the clear cuts
we make, the quarries we cut.
They're the way we interact with the skin of the planet.
We shape it to our vehicles, we shape it with our vehicles.
It's changed my esthetic.
For representational painting to stay alive,
it needs to actually have a raw edge
as opposed to a soothing edge that just keeps harkening back
to a previous esthetic.
♪♪
I'd like the people who come to the gallery
to have a shared experience with the painter.
I believe that a lot of artwork gets in between the artist
and the audience,
and I really want people to to say, “Hey, guess what?
I'm sharing the same culture as this person
no matter how we define it.”
It's an optical retinal culture of pigment and light,
and I'm sharing it with the artist.
That would be a complete experience for me.
♪♪
-”Peter Malarkey: Social Landscapes”
runs now through September 30th.
Hours and location are at RickLeonardGallery.com
♪♪
Catch Art Zone Friday nights at 8 and anytime
online at SeattleChannel.org/ArtZone.
♪♪