BLUE - Peter Loftus
The California Landscape
At the Thomas Reynolds Gallery in San Francisco
July 11 - August 23, 2014
OPENING RECEPTION
Friday, July 11, from 6 to 8 p.m.
WE ARE PLEASED to present "BLUE," an exhibition of work by eminent California landscape artist Peter Loftus painted along the central coast of California and at Lake Tahoe.
“Light-drenched pictures of the jagged cliffs, rocky shoreline and deep woods that run along Highway 1 on California's central coast celebrate the magic of the light, the place and nature,” a critic has written of Loftus's work. “Energy is everywhere present in the paint.”
Loftus was born in Washington, D.C., in 1948. He spent his childhood in France, India, Italy and Thailand, moving frequently with his family. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania. In the late 1970s, with an Ivy League art education under his belt, a love of the outdoors and a French easel, he packed everything he could fit into a station wagon and moved to California in search of the ideal light for his plein-air work. Later he moved into a studio above Santa Cruz and began turning the plein-air pieces into larger oil paintings.
“I want thorns and bugs in my paintings,” Loftus says, “because for something to transcend from pretty to beautiful there has to be some kind of flaw that endears it to us.”